“You should never build a CMS”

I have built several small websites in the past that were updated by non tech people.

I have tried, believe me, to make CMS work. I really did. But every time the customer came back with “can I do this or that” and inevitably, it fell in a blind corner of the CMS engine I was trying to use.

In the end, I developped something where the structure of the site matched a folder structure, setup a dropbox auto sync, and let the customers write anything they needed using markdown for content and yaml for metadata.

Sure, it didn’t do a hundredth of what the cms did, but it did what the customers needed. it took me less time to build this than to actually install/understand a cms system.

If I did have AI back then, it would have been even faster for me to build that stuff.

At some point, it just helps you get shit done.

How did you manage training non-tech people to edit yaml and markdown files?

How did this solve the CMS not supporting something they needed?

Did it simply make customizing functionality easier, since you are in total control of the codebase?

> something where the structure of the site matched a folder structure

Kirby?

That was my first try, but many things were missing from Kirby for what the customer wanted.

I got them to install MacDown, which is a standalone Markdown editor with side by side editing (text on the left, render on the right), and print a cheat sheet for links and images. Markdown is very easy to write. Nowadays there's probably an opensource wysiwyg editor.

The yaml part was very simple, it was handling the links for the menu entries..

Yes the customers wanted customized functionalities, like different ways to access the same pages, in the same tree.

Like you have Menu Item 1 => SubMenu Item 2 => List Item 3 is the same as Menu Item 3 => SubMenu Item 1 => List Item 5. Very few CMS do this, as the usual is to have a non cyclic tree hierarchy.

Here I had a main hierarchy reflected in the folder structure, and then they could add some links to the menu tree with the yaml files.

The whole thing was very simple. It took me about 16 hours to set up the whole site.

I am curious what was possible with yaml+md files that was impossible with flat file CMS. Afaik flat file CMSes are basically glorified .md editors.

I built something similar recently [0] with help from Claude Code (in Zed). It is still only a rough prototype, but I have tried it out on non-techy people for a project, and it has worked better than anything I have tried prior (Wordpress, Hugo etc).

I mount the folder with the content so they always has easy access to add and modify the website directly from the file explorer. It is quite powerful because there is not friction. You hit save, and it is live. This can off course be a drawback too, it is quicker to mess up stuff, but that is a trade off I am willing to make in 95% of the use cases I deal with.

[0] https://forge.dmz.skyfritt.net/ruben/folderweb

The markdown didn’t help with anything that CMS couldn’t do. But special sections of pages would render differently based on the yaml configs.

You may think of it as: for each page, the yaml contained the React props to render. I d write the the main components, and the user would inject content through yaml as they saw fit.