Experienced dev here working on fleshing out a brand and service targeting a local niche with my wife.
Say I want to use an off the shelf tool where a non-tech person can flesh out and theme a website on a custom domain. This person would be able to log in and draft blog posts/calendar events/e-commerce products from an admin type of UI. This tool would also allow customers to create accounts to interact with this site. This tool would also be able to connect to and use data from a 3rd party API that would be deployed and developed independently by myself.
I can build the service portion quickly, BUT… 1) I want my wife to manage content/marketing/branding independently through a UI, 2) I want to offload user management/servicing/permissions, and 3) I want to easily connect to and display data from my custom web API.
What tools have you all had success with?
Not sure what your tech stack is but I’d look at getting a cms package and hosting it yourself. With all of the scaffold-centric dev frameworks it’s trivial to set up a cms and then you also have control over how it interacts with your api. CORS? Stupid web form plugin won’t do what you want? Not an issue when you control it all.
I know the goal is to use your valuable dev knowledge on the “hard problems”, but I feel like you run the risk of using wix/shopify/etc and end up investing time in making it work for you. You could punt on it and use a hosted platform but if you do that, you don’t know when the hard problems are going to hit. Reacting to them could completely wipe the gains from using something off the shelf. Maybe buying the time is worth it, you’re a dev so you know every decision is a trade off and it’s ok to do something sub optimal if that risk is assessed up front.
Jekyll (ruby) and docusaurus (node) both come to mind as viable options. Combo it with a wysiwyg plugin if your wife is uncomfortable with markdown formatting (although she can always use a previewer in a text editor to verify her formatting). Themes are plentiful and simple to integrate for both the options I mentioned. There are of course many many other routes than Jekyll and docusaurus, your preferred language likely has options as well.
GitHub pages for hosting while it’s just a static site, depending on resources needed to integrate with your api you could probably get by with less than ten bucks a month on Heroku/north flank/fly.io/etc, or move it to wherever you choose host your api when it’s all piped together.
Alternatively you could consider Wordpress, since customization there is well supported. Some trade offs: you’ll be writing php, hackers/nefarious folks love Wordpress because inexperienced people use it without solid security practices, plug-ins might be less vetted (again security concern), hosting can be expensive annoying (though this third point holds true for other options as well).
Just my 2c but I’d seriously consider hosting this myself with a reliable package. It tows the line between being at the mercy of someone else’s code/limitations and distracting you from building your saas product by rolling a completely custom solution.
These are great points. Thanks for the comprehensive response.
We could probably get a lot of mileage out of the static site generation for the blog-like features while I fumble through something custom for everything else.