Use Netlify CMS as the editing UI

[timwis]

Following on from https://github.com/timwis/jkan/discussions/198

I've been really impressed with Netlify CMS. It worked out of the box with JKAN. You just add a configuration file, where you define the schema of your collections, and it generates a nice looking editing user interface.

It also ticks a lot of boxes for us:

• It's open source
• It doesn't require you run it on Netlify (or GitHub, for that matter)
• It requires minimal changes to JKAN (just a drop-in compiled JavaScript file, via CDN or vendoring)
• It's very customisable
• It even supports open authoring, which would let any end-user of JKAN propose a change via pull request through the UI (something @BryanQuigley proposed which I think would be awesome)

The only downside I can think of is that it's a single page app, so it requires JavaScript to run.

This pull request is just a demo. It's currently configured to run locally using the local backend feature. To try it out:

1. Clone this branch (netlify-cms)
2. From the local JKAN directory, run npx netlify-cms-proxy-server (requires Node.js)
3. Run JKAN with bundle exec jekyll serve
4. Navigate to localhost:4000/manage/

You should then be able to save changes to your local files, rather than to the repository on GitHub. When it's running in production we would remove the local_backend config option, and you would authenticate via GitHub.

If we agree this is the way forward, some of the remaining steps, I'd imagine, would be:

• [ ] Add the rest of the fields
• [ ] Review and decide on the backend and authentication options
• [ ] Try to reduce duplication between the netlify cms config schema and the schema we already have in _data/schemas/default.yml
• [ ] Add more accurate preview templates
• [x] Support editing site settings, as in the existing JKAN admin (site config), if possible
• [ ] Support editing categories and licenses
• [ ] Replace the existing JKAN editing UI with links to this, and make it clear to contributors that they're welcome too

Thoughts?

[BryanQuigley]

That looks/works awesome!

For running Jekyll locally from docker compose I had to add: local_backend: allowed_hosts: ['0.0.0.0']

I like the idea of supporting using netlify-cms locally in addition to potentially adding the github backend.

[timwis]

Okay, I'll break this out into issues to track the work. I managed to get site settings added to the editor UI this morning, which was surprisingly easy.

[BryanQuigley]

Let's get a version that just works locally for now, and keep Netlify bits for a future enhancement.

Getting some version of this and #213 committed makes further work much easier.

We are hoping to make our fork for OpenDataPhilly some time in the next couple weeks - and want to finish these (and other) big changes first.

[timwis]

Okay, I've created a v2 branch so we can start merging these without updating the JKAN website, docs etc. Hopefully it won't be long before we can 'release' v2 (merge it into gh-pages), but (a) we'll want to make sure we have release notes, updated docs, and it's easy for new users to spin up a new JKAN instance, and (b) you don't need all that to kick off your fork. So hopefully you can fork off the v2 branch for the time being? Let me know if that works for you.

P.S. Where are you planning to host OpenDataPhilly? Are you up for using Netlify?