Show HN: TerminusCMS – Headless CMS for Devs

9 points

3 years ago

Existing headless CMS tools are mostly making it up as they go along - starting with the idea of ‘I want to build a company that delivers a headless CMS’ and then quickly slapping a bunch of technologies together and ending up with a pile of JSONs floating around a MongoDB or another similar frankenstein. As we’d already built the document graph data layer from the ground up, we could properly integrate the CMS features to give a seamless developer experience. We are never going to send you to a screen that says, ‘TerminusCRM requires NodeJS version 10+ and a Mongo database’. It is all contained in one in-memory, highly compressed data management system that we designed and built for this specific purpose.

A few of the other offerings are just headless markdown backed by git - which is actually a good idea, but comes with the capacity and performance limitations that git implies.

Why not have a highly performant document graph content management system that incorporates the most important concepts from git in the data layer? All the version control features that content needs (clone, push, pull, branch, revert, merge) and are highly awkward in other systems. We also thought that GraphQL was the obvious data manipulation choice for content, but found weak implementations wherever we looked. For TerminusCMS, we’ve implemented a suite of features which allows you to query a TerminusCMS project using GraphQL in such a way that deep linking can be discovered. We can use path queries with GraphQL.

To summarize our market thoughts - it seems that devs want:

- Deploy anywhere open-source - Dev-first in memory, highly compressed, scalable and fast content management so you can build complex and fully featured web apps of every shape and size - Git-like features to help with permissions and version control (and - crucially - merge) - Best-in-class GraphQL implementation

And there was nothing offering that mix until we released TerminusCMS.

TerminusCMS is a content platform that sits at the convergence of content and knowledge. It is a model-driven, API-first approach to content management. With TerminusCMS you can use your data as content. The data employed in content has meanings associated with it, and because that content is well structured, the content can also be used as if it were data — in fact, that content is data. TerminusCMS is structured like Git, so you get all the git-like features for your content engine. History, change management, branching, non-linear development, easy backups, distributed development, and more. You can enrich your content with semantics which can give you the ability to personalize content and build superior recommender and AI/ML systems.

Content curation needs change requests: you need to be able to add a new translation, or new content in a branch, which is viewable as an entire site, but which only goes into production when you "merge to main".

TerminusCMS gives devs a powerful way to define schema, query, deliver content and assets to front end. It has schema-as-code; is standards-based for interoperability; has an extremely fast publishing API; and provides workflows made by way of content and network model, not wired into product itself. It give editors a way to manage content automatically so that devs don't need to do much to support them. You can use TerminusCMS to build your complex app, or to manage your organization knowledge.

TerminusCMS is open-source all the way down, so if we vanish or piss you off, you can recover and continue.

The business is cloud hosting and enterprise delivery, which we hope can keep the wolf from the door. It is freemium with a generous free tier and easily cloned examples, so take a look.

[1] https://terminusdb.com/ [2] https://github.com/GavinMendelGleason/blog/blob/main/entries/content_revolution.md