Which Headless CMS do you use for your blog and do you recommend it or not
Tags: cms, productivity, healthydebate
Published: 2020-03-05 10:08:09

Hello, I am gonna go on a bit of rant here, but there does not seem to be too much good options for Headless CMS for the developer/blogger which has a free tier. I am currently using Contentful, which has a nice user interface, a generous free tier and a nice way to create Content models for different use cases. It is used by big companies and has a huge team behind it. However, it is not without its flaws (IMHO)

I am using Contentful with Gatsby and here is some of the things I find annoying from my experience...

1. I need to rebuild the site every single time I publish a new article. So if there is a small spelling mistake, then another rebuild. That eats up a ton of build minutes on Netlify. 

2. The rich text content editor is `buggy` and the preview layout is totally different than what is on the site. I have to constantly make sure that the spacing is recognized inside of the editor, and often that involves adding extra line breaks. This makes it is more spaced out on the editor than what renders on the site.

3. Uploading images is super tedious, cumbersome and slow. Why is there no easy drag and drop. 


4. Limited options in the Rich Text Content Editor. The rich text editor is only slightly better than the almost useless MarkDown editor. For example they do not have the options to 

a) Make subscripts or superscripts 
b) Make centering of text easy. Actually it is very sad that this very simplistic use case is not even possible in the editor. You do not have the option to have some text centered and some text left centered within the same rich text field :(

It would be nice if they had some extra code embed options as well. For example in the long form rich text editor you might be writing an article where you embed some CSS, HTML and JS code. Contentful does not allow you to do that in a flexible way. Though there is probably no CMS out that will have that feature, where you can drop code in, select a language and have it perfectly displayed like if you were using https://prismjs.com/

If you are writing all your articles in a very structured manner and they all look the same and things occur in the same order than Contentful works okay. Otherwise, it is problematic. Further, it requires a lot of hands on developer work to customize. 

These major flaws outlined make Contentful a writing averse platform due to the extra time needed to write and publish an article.  

The user experience for writing on the Medium Platform is absolutely amazing. Unfortunately, I have not seen any available CMS that even comes close. Hate or love WordPress (I personally am on the hate side), WP makes it easy to write articles and customize the content for anyone, even if it's a developers nightmare.  

Why is there no headless CMS that can combine some of the powerful Content modeling features Contentful provides with the amazing writing UX on the Medium Platform? Whichever CMS does this first, and provides a free tier to the personal bloggers will definitely topple all other current CMS platforms.

Thoughts?