4 ms·

Show HN: DatoCMS – A client-friendly CMS for any static website generator

40 points by steffoz 10y ago

steffoz 10y ago
Hi guys, creator here. We started building DatoCMS as a side-project a year ago as Contentful was way too complicated for our web agency average brochure website client. We quietly launched the product 4 months ago: Since then we are getting steady signups and paying customers through organic traffic. Customer feedback has been an invaluable tool so far to route our development roadmap. Eager to receive some more feedback here :)
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  My feedback is: I was interested because I thought it was something that would allow me to "edit files in the browser", in the sense that it would keep the contents and a virtual file structure somewhat like what I keep for my static sites in my disk, but since I have to define a schema that is too complicated for me. This is not a criticism nor a feature request.
  - steffoz 10y ago
    There's other solutions that implement this approach.. Prose.io for example (http://prose.io/ http://prose.io/)
    - fiatjaf 10y ago
      Prose.io does nothing GitHub itself doesn't offer. But hey, maybe someone will write something like what I described. Maybe I will.
giova 10y ago
Top
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mrmondo 10y ago
Love the idea and it looks slick but if it's not open source and I can't host it myself then that's a show stopper for me and my clients.
- steffoz 10y ago
  We're seriously evaluating the possibility of open-sourcing the product, following the example of ie. Ghost. It's pretty clear to me that it's the only way we can 100% guarantee to our customers a product that's here to stay. Nevertheless, static websites are extremely open by-design. If you're no longer interested in using DatoCMS for whatever reason, you can simply export all the content and go back editing your Markdown files manually or with some other tool.
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  So you have a lot of clients who will pay you but you want the person who wrote this highly complex tool to give you their source code for free? Would you consider paying a price for a hosted version of the product (not the source code)?
  - brudgers 10y ago
    That is an uncharitable reading of the comment because the person did not ask/demand that the software be open sourced. Instead it provided specific feedback as to why the software did not meet their business needs. Those needs are not without historical precedent where a company has taken a dependency upon another company that later folded or changed direction or updated the product in incompatible ways or repriced it in ways that changed the value proposition. The decision to only use open source software looks like it was made based on client's best interests and professional experience.
    - fiatjaf 10y ago
      I was about to disagree with you, but reread the original comment and it indeed can be read that way. At first I read it as if the commenter were complaining of the closedsourcedness of DatoCMS.
martinbottanek 10y ago
Looks pretty awesome! What if I want to use CDN to host images? Maybe I've missed something but I could only find an option to Upload images.
- steffoz 10y ago
  Images uploaded to DatoCMS are already served using Cloudflare on top of Imgix. Imgix is a great CDN service that also handles on-the-fly image processing for you (crop, resize, watermarks, etc). Super handy.

40 points by steffoz 10y ago

Hi guys, creator here. We started building DatoCMS as a side-project a year ago as Contentful was way too complicated for our web agency average brochure website client. We quietly launched the product 4 months ago: Since then we are getting steady signups and paying customers through organic traffic. Customer feedback has been an invaluable tool so far to route our development roadmap. Eager to receive some more feedback here :)

fiatjaf 10y ago
My feedback is: I was interested because I thought it was something that would allow me to "edit files in the browser", in the sense that it would keep the contents and a virtual file structure somewhat like what I keep for my static sites in my disk, but since I have to define a schema that is too complicated for me. This is not a criticism nor a feature request.
- steffoz 10y ago
  There's other solutions that implement this approach.. Prose.io for example (http://prose.io/ http://prose.io/)
  - fiatjaf 10y ago
    Prose.io does nothing GitHub itself doesn't offer. But hey, maybe someone will write something like what I described. Maybe I will.

giova 10y ago

Top

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

mrmondo 10y ago

Love the idea and it looks slick but if it's not open source and I can't host it myself then that's a show stopper for me and my clients.

steffoz 10y ago
We're seriously evaluating the possibility of open-sourcing the product, following the example of ie. Ghost. It's pretty clear to me that it's the only way we can 100% guarantee to our customers a product that's here to stay. Nevertheless, static websites are extremely open by-design. If you're no longer interested in using DatoCMS for whatever reason, you can simply export all the content and go back editing your Markdown files manually or with some other tool.
fiatjaf 10y ago
So you have a lot of clients who will pay you but you want the person who wrote this highly complex tool to give you their source code for free? Would you consider paying a price for a hosted version of the product (not the source code)?
- brudgers 10y ago
  That is an uncharitable reading of the comment because the person did not ask/demand that the software be open sourced. Instead it provided specific feedback as to why the software did not meet their business needs. Those needs are not without historical precedent where a company has taken a dependency upon another company that later folded or changed direction or updated the product in incompatible ways or repriced it in ways that changed the value proposition. The decision to only use open source software looks like it was made based on client's best interests and professional experience.
  - fiatjaf 10y ago
    I was about to disagree with you, but reread the original comment and it indeed can be read that way. At first I read it as if the commenter were complaining of the closedsourcedness of DatoCMS.

martinbottanek 10y ago

Looks pretty awesome! What if I want to use CDN to host images? Maybe I've missed something but I could only find an option to Upload images.

steffoz 10y ago
Images uploaded to DatoCMS are already served using Cloudflare on top of Imgix. Imgix is a great CDN service that also handles on-the-fly image processing for you (crop, resize, watermarks, etc). Super handy.