You have twenty good tips already, but nobody seems to have mentioned that you can run WordPress fully headless.

https://www.gatsbyjs.com/docs/glossary/headless-wordpress/

Keystatic[1] is awesome. It's local-first by default and made for static site builds, so you can keep costs low by not using a server.

I've used it alongside Astro for both my personal blog[2] and two company sites[3][4]. It's worked amazingly well each time.

[1] https://keystatic.com/

[2] https://github.com/skeptrunedev/personal-site

[3] https://github.com/devflowinc/trieve/tree/main/website

[4] https://github.com/patroninc/patron/tree/main/website

I wouldn't be setting up a static site + headless CMS for a non-technical organization. This is basically asking for a constant headache.

Just set them up on a website builder like Webflow/Framer/Ycode/Squarespace/etc that has a CMS built in.

If there's a no-code way to edit content and AI can work with the rest then I think it's fine.

On the other hand I worked for a small place that was spending over 250k'ish per year on website maintenance to a company that setup their headless CMS website that they sold them.

They complained about it constantly but they kept paying (7 years and going when I was doing work for them which by they way they constantly tried to shortchange me). Never feel bad about taking money from a company, its just business. Setup your income stream and take care of yourself. I'm not sure why there is this bizarre self sacrificing mentality in tech to make other people rich at your own expense.

Not to mention if you invoke those companies you are putting yourself in their walled garden that makes them money and takes control of your income away from you. Why would any person want to do that? There is no moral quandary here.

> Not to mention if you invoke those companies you are putting yourself in their walled garden that makes them money and takes control of your income away from you. Why would any person want to do that? There is no moral quandary here.

Buying into proprietary software and walled gardens is ridiculously common and acceptable in a business environment. That's code for "no liability if something goes wrong, minimal maintenance, and easy onboarding of new employees."

I really enjoyed sanity.io a year ago. It had the best data structure flexibility by a mile, with the ability to have multiple user draft states and merge conflict resolution.

Other Headless CMS felt restrictive, with shared drafts or the requirement for all published items to have changes go live instantly.

Once you're set up with your schema, the UI is easy enough for non-developers (and you can customize it for them if needed).

Checkout Sonic - https://github.com/lane711/sonicjs

Why headless ? If non technical admin will post details about events, you can find a WordPress plugin for it and setup a WP site. Headless makes sense if you want to really customize the experience but you want "cheapest option" so I would assume they cannot pay for customizations anyway.

I know this is for a non-technical admin, but I just wanted to give Zola [0] a shoutout.

I love the single binary approach, and it being so simple. Got my blog up and running in minutes with absolutely minimal configuration. Helps me focus on the writing rather than tinkering with the tool I think this coupled with Keystatic [1] could be a nifty little lightweight setup for most.

[0] https://github.com/getzola/zola

[1] https://keystatic.com/

Too bad it doesn't quite support dates in the dir paths.

I'd like to recommend a highly underappreciated single binary rewrite of Jekyll in Go: https://github.com/osteele/gojekyll

Or use decap https://decapcms.org/

Used directus[0] (v9) for a customer project[1]. I needed to sync the CMS content with meilisearch[2], so I had to write a custom extension that registers some hooks[3] for that. I discovered some weirdness in the API, since the payload of a hook behaves differently whether the CMS change gets triggered via UI event, API request, or CSV upload. Was a bit annoying, but got it working in the end. Don't know if that improved in later versions, but I honestly also didn't keep up with development since the license change.

[0]: https://directus.io/

[1]: https://genopedia.com/

[2]: https://www.meilisearch.com/

[3]: https://directus.io/docs/guides/extensions/api-extensions/ho...

I’m building my personal blog with 11ty as a static site builder and Decap[0], previously known as Netlify CMS, to manage content.

Basically it provides a UI and all changes are pushed to GitHub which will launch the release process back in Netlify.

Seems it might fit your requirements too.

0. https://decapcms.org/

Also highly recommending decap CMS, or the svelte version sveltia[0]. With Gitlab backend and PKCE authorization, this CMS connects directly to gitlab without any other middleware (unlike when using Github, which will require one for the auth). With a gitlab pages + decap CMS + static site (jamstack), it is possible to have a site running at no cost. Currently having 20+ sites running this setup for clients and never hit an issue "modeling" the data as Decap config, widgets (also custom ones), can allow pretty much anything.

One downside for this setup, is that uploaded media are not re-sized or compressed (since there is no backend job doing it), so a client must be briefed into "making smaller images" (on the web client side with squoosh.app[2] for example), or using a SSG that does that built-in (hugo, gatsby)

0. https://github.com/sveltia

1. https://decapcms.org/docs/gitlab-backend/#client-side-pkce-a...

2. https://squoosh.app

Dev budget under $25k: Statamic [1] or Wordpress (with ACF [2] & Acorn [3])

Professional work above that: Sanity [4] or Hygraph [5]

[1] https://statamic.com

[2] https://www.advancedcustomfields.com

[3] https://roots.io/acorn/

[4] https://www.sanity.io

[5] https://hygraph.com

If you have a registered nonprofit, like a 501(c)(3), you can often get a substantial break from some SaaS companies.

Some will give you the service for free (rate-limited, probably), while others may not give you a break at all.

I will say Caveat Emptor. If you keep your backend on Someone Else's Machine, they can hold your data hostage. Hosting should be fine, but some SaaS companies have a nasty habit of considering any data they have access to, to be "theirs." May be fine, until they sell the company, at which time, bend over and squeal.

Source: Been doing nonprofit development work since last century.

We recently landed on Strapi. There’s an open source version but we use the hosted one (for now). All in all good. There are a few quirks in the UI (sometimes smaller changes weren’t saved - although this might be a user issue from my side) and the markdown editor could be more user friendly.

We are sticking with it for now because it’s indeed good enough and I haven’t found any better options (give the price).

IIRC Strapi is a great option for green field projects. C/p from their docs:

"Strapi applications are not meant to be connected to a pre-existing database, not created by a Strapi application, nor connected to a Strapi v3 database. The Strapi team will not support such attempts. Attempting to connect to an unsupported database may, and most likely will, result in lost data."

Unfortunately, most of the time I do not have such luxury. What are the CMS options for pre-existing databases?

Craft CMS - https://craftcms.com - is superb and still seems to be under the radar, I often wonder why it’s not more widely used

Wagtail CMS, built on top of django. https://wagtail.org/

I use Craft CMS’ GraphQL capabilities with my Eleventy site. Works well and helps me keep my page loads static. I would also recommend Directus for this, as it has some nice quality-of-life benefits.

To manage deploys, I have used Cleavr, which does a good job at it without being too user-unfriendly. That’s a paid service, about $6/month.

Headless is a constraint you added as a developer for yourself - it's definitely not a thing the users will care about. Ghost is a great, simple, batteries included non-headless CMS for things like you describe. Self-hosted or as a service.

Sorry I know you said headless, but have you considered wordpress? Its unsexy, but the ecosystem is really well suited for this and hosting is dirt cheap.

Because its so popular and been around for so long, theres tons of free themes, plugins and videos which will reduce your support burden - plus your admin could get help easily as its not something you rolled.

Other than that, decap on gitlab is easy to run for free, and will provide the admin with a ui for editing content. Astro is also great and stable for this type of thing.

Wordpress? Why does it need to be headless though?

yeah, that's also what i don't understand, you can get wordpress for dirt cheap and don't even need a tech person to run it.

like if you dont have any money you can get wordpress hosting for free from wordpress.com

Some people might not like WordPress' templating system. Last I looked at it, admittedly 5 years ago, it was kind of annoying. I had to use Advanced Custom Fields to build weird things content types but the general blogging engine still seemed pretty good.

A gmail account and a public calendar and embed widget.

Im using directus (https://directus.io/) for my personal website with a vacation blog and some posts…

So far it works pretty well and my gf is also able to use it on her own, so you could say its non-tech user approved haha

I also did some websites using hugo and DecapCMS from netlify. That also worked but the ui isnt to fancy and it gets a bit confusing on complex pages. But it can directly push to a git repo so you have version control out of the box

I think it depends a little on what your intended head is? Headless CMS is just CRUD UI for a database that has an API.

There are plenty available: https://jamstack.org/headless-cms/ Keystone mb?

You may also want to check things like Appwrite for hosted solution (free plan available) or PocketBase for self-hosting on any VPS (fly.io does not charge below 5$). Those are more developer-focused, but also should be much less restrictive.

Have no real experience with any of them.

PayloadCMS seems really interesting, I’ve used it successfully for a small blog but I feel it has a lot of potential. It’s not fully open source, if you want additional features like SSO you have to pay for premium version.

They got acquired by Figma so I would not build on payload anymore, I fully expect the product to wither away now given Figma has their own priorities and has a non-technical userbase.

> They don't have funding.

Well how are they then going to pay for their web hosting? Tell them to scram.

i've been super happy with Ghost for our blog http://mixpeek.com/blog