Content management system for Phoenix?

jukvalim

Hi all!

I have a potential case that involves a web site with a lot of admin-generated content, as well as custom features. So it needs CMS functionality, and I could use some advice on my options. The way I see it, currently my options are:

Use a CMS made for Phoenix. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like there is a well-featured one that is maintained. Thesis and Contento both look like they’ve been abandoned.
Use a headless CMS such as Ghost or Strapi and integrate with it. Downside: it makes the app more of a distributed system with related headaches and extra work.
Roll my own. Not loving this idea at the moment, even though I could maybe use something like Kaffy to build on.
Write the app in Python and use Django and Wagtail. Downside: loss of Elixir goodies, the concurrency model in particular.

If you have suggestions or ideas, I’d be happy to hear them.

14 comments

/phoenix #cms

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2024-04-03 15:03:30 UTC

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elmercante

Just wanted to drop my experience with BeaconCMS in here for anyone that needs it.

It works well, but (as of the time of writing this) the installation can be a little rough. Some dependency conflicts may pop up. For me, there was a need to add some of beacon_live_admin’s configuration files to the application where I have beacon_live_admin installed.

I ran into some issues with the install command (mix beacon.install --site my_site). Nothing major, but the script wasn’t finding the correct files to make a few of the code injections. You might want to use the manual instructions, instead.

The installation instructions don’t mention it, but you’ll need to create a database or use your existing one in the Beacon repo configurations. Also Beacon has migrations, so they’ll need to be ran.

TLDR: It works well. Installation was a little rocky, but I’m looking forward to working with Beacon CMS.

Post #13

vincer

We’re working on an Elixir-based CMS with Postgres + Elasticsearch + Absinthe GraphQL + Vue over here. It’s not quite ready for prime-time, but getting there. Currently fighting with Absinthe to get dynamic runtime GraphQL schemas (for user-defined data models).

In the meantime, we’ve found Prismic to be pretty cost-effective for clients we work with as it has a generous free tier and a pretty good API. There’s also Storyblok, Takeshape and Sanity that have decent free tiers. I doubt it’s worth the trouble to maintain a separate CMS in Node, but your mileage may vary.

Post #1

elmercante

Understood. Yea I was hoping to give it a try, because I had a similar experience with the Beacon CMS demo a month or two ago.

I’m really glad to see Beacon’s making a strong open source effort, though. Really looks promising. I’m going to give BeaconCMS a try in a new project. I’ll try to add my experience to this thread.

Post #12

Last Post!

elmercante

@rsrsm the only other headless CMS option we really considered was Pardall. However, we were prepared to fork and extend Pardall for our own needs, because we determined that it’s not currently “non-engineer friendly”. There are paid solutions like Strapi, but we preferred a open source solution because we want to be able to access the codebase and it’s free. Right now we’re using Beacon CMS in our project. Like I said in my previous post, it’s a still a work in progress, but the ceiling is very high for Beacon. I recommend watching the presentation of Beacon by Leandro Pereira that @ryanwinchester posted.

Post #15