Git-based CMS

It seems all my ideas today follow the same vein: “x for developers”

So what would a CMS designed for developers look like?

One idea is to use a git-based workflow. It would enable:

• Storing all content in a Git repo. ie. in YAML or JSON files
• Reviewing changes with PRs.
• Each PR gets a branch deploy for reviewing.
• Merging PR deploys contentto production.
• Data format is very flexible.
• Can support multi-lingual data.
• Can push notify content changes via a WebSocket.

Accessing content

Content can be accessed via HTTP:

curl localhost:3000/content/<content-path>

Let’s say we have a directory structure like this:

-- content/
---- team/
------ john.yml
------ jane.yml

And each .yml file looks like this: (format is arbitrary)

name: ...
position: ...
bio: ...

Then we can use the file path to query:

> curl http://localhost:3000/content/team/john
{
  "team": {
    "john": {
      "name": "John Smith"
      "position": "Account Executive"
    }
  }
}

Since each yaml file is a dictionary, we can query inside it too:

> curl http://localhost:3000/content/team/john/name
{
  "team": {
    "john": {
      "name": "John Smith"
    }
  }
}

or we can zoom out and query an entire folder:

> curl http://localhost:3000/content/team
{
  "team": {
    "john": { ... },
    "jane": { ... }
  }
}

or even multiple queries at once:

> curl http://localhost:3000/content/[team/john/name,team/jane/name]
{
  "team": {
    "john": {
      "name": "John Smith"
    },
    "jane": {
      "name": "Jane Doe"
    }
  }
}

The entire folder structure and its files are turned into a one queryable (nested) dictionary.