Rewriting Pages CMS with React/Next.js?

[hunvreus]

I want Pages CMS to be an obvious choice for developers when they're building modern websites or apps.

Whether you're building a website with 11ty or Hugo, or an app with Next.js or Astro, Pages CMS should be a no-brainer if your project is hosted on GitHub (and maybe even GitLab, Gitea...).

As a developer, it should be easy to get started by dropping a single file in your repo.

As you grow, you should be able to easily bring in non-technical contributors (e.g. invite by email, commenting, real-time collaboration) and leverage more advanced features (e.g. search API, GraphQL API, recommendation engine...)

I think I got to a reasonable place, validating there is at least some demand, but the backlog is pretty long. Lots to build.

And part of what kept me busy the past few months was that I had to learn coding again after 7+ years or not really building anything serious on my own (that hasn't been part of my day job).

I picked what I remembered was easy to get things done: Vue.js.

Here is the issue: rewrites are mostly a waste of time, BUT, in this case, the current stack may hurt adoption and impact:

• My early adopters AND contributors, front-end developers, have overwhelmingly picked React and Next.js as the standard.
• shadcn/ui is very close (in style) to what I've built myself. And UI is a freaking rabbit hole, especially if you want decent accessibility.
• A lot of what I used to like about Vue (batteries included, simplicity of the API, "get things done" approach, ...) is either addressed by Next.js or simply not holding true anymore (Vue 3 + Composition API).
• I now need more than a few serverless functions to handle advanced features (e.g. invite by email). I've started prototyping with Hono, but wouldn't it make more sense to pick the current favorite for front-end devs (i.e. Next.js)?

I've been muling over this for a few weeks now and really didn't want to do it. But I think I'm going to take the next few weeks and see if I can get Pages CMS ported to React/Next.js.

To those of you out there who tried or use Pages CMS: do you care? Do you disagree with this analysis?

[leejoramo-d51]

First, I need to say that I don't deeply know your project. I have been watching it for the past month or two when it came up on my regular searches for this type of CMS. I had been using Forestry, which stopped service last year (I didn't like Tina, the follow up project). I have experience going back over 20 years with various Static Renders and full CMS's such as Drupal and Phone. More recently I have used Hugo on the back end.

I have been very pleased with the development of Pages CMS, and I am VERY likely to use it for my next site or migration. So far I have only played with it in my local development environment.

I my experience, rewrites are almost always no-win situations. At best, you fix some technical debt that was causing significant problems, or allow some critical new features that could not reasonable done.

In the case of Open Source projects, you risk burning all of the time and good will of your community. Your current users have gotten you to this point, and they will be forced to start over too. This is especially true for your most advanced users.

I would ask some of these questions:

• Are your current users asking for this change? Either directly or via the features they need.
• Will the rewrite pay for itself. Do you have paying clients that want this and are willing to fund the change?
• Do you consider the current state of the project to be an early Alpha? You have made not promises, and features and API's are not guaranteed.
• Will this rewrite cause the project to loose momentum, or is this a change that will in a short amount of time speed up development.

Personally, as a developer, my tools of choice these days are SvelteKit with both NodeJS/Express and Python on the backend. I would be willing to work on Vue, but I really don't like React.

At the same time, I am looking to Pages CMS to be mostly a drop in Application for my users with mostly configuration on my part and little in the way of development programming. So I may not really care about your tool stack.

I will end with one more question:

• Does the idea of this change, make you as the owner of an Open Source project feel energized and excited?

[rohannelson]

I'm only an entry level developer so I don't have heaps of experience to speak from, but...

I do think the popularity of React would mean more people would be able to contribute - I don't imagine heaps of people will be going out of their way to learn Vue these days, although I could be wrong. I know I have thought that it would be cool to contribute to this project but I don't know Vue so I haven't.

My main hesitation with Next.js is what I've heard about a level of vendor lock-in with certain features only really being supported by Vercel. Remix could be an alternative React framework, although I haven't worked with it much.

Another alternative could be using Astro as SSR for a React app? I've used Astro a bunch and it's great (including with React and haven't had any problems there).

I like the idea of Svelte and Sveltekit but I haven't worked with them so can't really speak to that.

As for rebuild or not - I guess in some ways if you're going to do it, better to do it now than later. The longer you leave it the greater the cost. I like the idea of being able to contribute so I'd vote in favour of a rebuild if it was in React.

Anyway, that's my two cents. Love the app so far.

[rohannelson]

@hunvreus - any further thoughts on this one?

[hunvreus]

I've been traveling a lot in the past few weeks, but I did find the time to learn Next.js.

I've just started working on the Next.js version of Pages CMS. Lots of changes obviously, but I'm able to recycle a lot of my code ,although I still need a fair amount of adjustments and changes (e.g. move to shadcn/ui, convert to Typescript etc).

I think we'll be better off in the long run: easier to get contributors, better security, etc. This will be very helpful once I release the Pro features.

[olegfedak]

Have you considered Vue/Nuxt as an analog of React/Next? Community of Nuxt is pretty active.

[hunvreus]

The current version of Pages CMS was built with Vue and I considered Nuxt. But React/Next.js just has more market share and I'd love to get as many contributors as possible.

Nuxt looks solid though.

[olegfedak]

I found Pages CMS because I was looking for a git-based CMS written with Vue :D

Well, have a great development!