Is this project dead?

I asked about the future of this project on Github, and Erez responded but he’s not with your company any longer. What is the future of netlify-cms? · decaporg/decap-cms · Discussion #6503 · GitHub
The right end of this graph shows no changes for a while:
Code frequency · decaporg/decap-cms · GitHub

The most recent merged pull request was almost two months ago, and 44 have now piled up. There are 686 open issues, with many over five years old. Beta features do not graduate. The parent widget is stuck in labs. After @erquhart left Netlify, the velocity of the CMS slowed significantly, and has now reached 0. Does Netlify have a plan in place to resuscitate it? Should the community fork and manage it without you?

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Hey there, @Brian_MacKinney :wave:

Thanks so much for reaching out about this. I have sent your question directly to the product team so that we can get better clarity for you. We will follow up here as soon as we have an update!

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No responses, no plan. It’s time for a fork.

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@hillary @krider2010 is there going to be an update? It’s been over three weeks since my initial question on GitHub.

Hey there, @Brian_MacKinney :wave:

Thanks for following up here, I recognize that this is important and timely for you. Unfortunately, I am simply the messenger here! I have asked our Product team for updates and will follow up with you directly when I have any details.

Thanks in advance for your patience.

It’s simply difficult to imagine why the questions I asked here and on GitHub take more than a day for them to answer.

Hey Brian,

I am sorry to say that our Support and Forums teams cannot provide the answer you request. If our Support and Forums team could answer those questions ourselves, we would have answered already.

I hope it is clear from the lack of quick answer that there isn’t an easy direct answer, so I’d like to ask for your patience as our larger team discusses this future and gets back to you with an answer from a leader, rather than a technical support answer, which is what we’re able to provide authoritatively. Technical support answer? You’re on your own anyway; we mention this lack of support, right in our scope of support: Netlify Scope of Support and have for several years. You are welcome to use and extend the CMS all you like; the license explicitly allows for this. Fork Away!

What I can tell you is this: Netlify has not directly led the development on the CMS for some time; it has been community-led for well over a year. We still contribute when we can, and as you can see, the code is still available. On the cms’ own web page, we point you to community support: Community | Netlify CMS | Open-Source Content Management System

Thank you for your patience while our several authoritative stakeholders - nobody involved in this thread including me - come up with a plan.

If you can’t wait any longer for a plan, I suggest you investigate using another CMS. Many CMS’s work well with netlify. While we use our own CMS, we also use Sanity and Forestry and both are great products. Many of our customers also use Contentful, if you are looking for something more commercial.

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I realized all of that, and my last reply was intended to be relayed to the product team, since it is apparent no one is monitoring GitHub. No answer is an answer, here and there.

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Hey there, @Brian_MacKinney :wave:

We have relayed all of your responses to the Product team! While it may not speed up the decision, they are aware of your sentiments.

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Hey Brian - thank you for the feedback, and appreciate your patience, I know it’s frustrating not hearing directly from the product team.

We are still looking at the right path for Netlify CMS, but the way our engineering efforts are currently aligned means that we mostly rely on community contributions and support for the project to stay up-to-date. We will update the folks using Netlify CMS as soon as possible once we determine the right path forward, but in the meantime you are free to use the product in its current state or fork it and tweak it to adjust to your scenarios (the beauty of open-source is that anyone can do it at any point).

Let us know if we can provide more context!

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Thanks for the response. When Erez was around, relying on community contributions meant nothing much changed. No one was driving development or shepherding the new UX project, moving features out of beta, etc. The issue with relying on community contributions at this point is you’re not paying attention to those contributions, and no one has been identified as capable of reviewing or merging pull requests.

I did fork the project, and dependabot immediately alerted me to security vulnerabilities. Here’s the count by severity.

image

45,385 Repositories depend on netlify/netlify-cms

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I am not an employee of Netlify. I am just here as a long-time user and supporter of Netlify

Whilst the new endeavours Netlify are taking on excites me, I would like to add my two cents here. I agree with @Brian_MacKinney that Netlify CMS has been in a limbo state arguably for the past couple years. The project opened many doors for many developers unable to pay for costly API driven CMS’. It played a major role in Netlify’s opensource ecosystem used by the common dev - it would be a real shame to see maintenance of this project come to an end.

Netlify - in my eyes - will always be the platform for the common man; a service priced reasonably enough as not to exclude small business and those without great funds in the bank. Unlike its competitors Netlify is not exclusive to giant enterprise organisations. Netlify is community driven (as proven by these very support forums) and I believe that is why Netlify will always have the upper hand in the industry.

Tools like Netlify CMS and the GoTrue API play a massive role in Netlify’s usage to the average user; I would love to see their renaissance in the Netlify eco-system. The community looks forward to the product team’s plans for the future.

Kyle

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Thanks for the reply on this. If this helps inform your stakeholders at all:

We sunk a fairly large client project into Netlify CMS + Gatsby, to great effect – we pulled off a sophisticated site that features a page-builder model. High-design custom components are rendered in a page template in the order they appear in the CMS and can be easily added and rearranged - it all works beautifully! The output pages are code-split using the Loadable library to only include the components they render.

Our team is able to make easy updates to the site and avoided adding another monthly fee for our client. It’s working really well!

I came upon this thread after we bumped into a blocker where we can’t upgrade Gatsby to the latest version due to limitations in cross-support with the CMS. That was when I noticed that there were 700 open issues not being actively addressed.

Of course it’s a little worrisome that we’re blocked on this, since eventually the version of Gatsby we’re stuck on won’t be maintained and we’ll end up in a corner having to upgrade the site to use a different system. I wanted to pitch into this conversation to remind that as paying customers and Partners we trust that your team won’t leave us out on a limb with an excellent product that really should get a second lease on life.

Thanks for your time!

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In addition to what Moses said above, I’d like to lay out another rationale for the product team to consider: revenue.

With Netlify’s recent pricing changes (requiring a seat for anyone contributing to a repo to trigger builds) NetlifyCMS is not really a “free” solution, given that the content is stored and modified as files within a repo. For us alone, this meant that we had to purchase three “Git Contributor” seats for our non-developer editors, in both our own instance and our client’s instance. Which means we essentially went from a $0/month CMS to a $120/month CMS for this project. That’s more than what we’d pay for Sanity.

While I’m not very happy about that new recurring cost, it’s substantially less than the effort that it would take to migrate to another CMS, so I’m… fine with it. Though we may be forced to switch out of a lack of maintenance (eg the present incompatibility with Gatsby 4). I’m sure we’re not the only ones in this position. Whether this amounts to a meaningful revenue stream is another question, but it is one that could be kept going for quite a while I’d think.

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@mfan can you elaborate on how using Netlifycms increases the monthly cost? I can’t find this on the Netlify pricing page.

Maybe he was referring to GitHub specific pricing? I can add as much client accounts as I want without Netlify contributor price increases. New admin accounts do not add to your monthly costs with Netlify and Netlify CMS. I do use it with Gitlab though.

On-topic:
Please do not mothball this great and easy-to-use CMS as it is one of the main reasons to choose for Netlify services with new clients. We’ve built a Netlify CMS page builder with custom previews with HUGO and AMP and Yoast to great costs basing our trust in Netlify as a leader in this space.

If this is indeed the end of netlify-cms I’ll be very sad. There’s absolutely nothing that comes even close to its functionality and ease of publishing without using a database or an external service.

I’ve snooped the source code and my network tab to see if I could make sense of how it even work but it’s beyond my knowledge of git and the Github API. I really hope someone tries to take its core and keep at least that alive.

At the very least it’d be great if it was kept in maintenance mode rather than completely abandoned. Not being able to upgrade to newer versions of React will definitely be the final nail in the coffin in that case.

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I can weigh in for our situation. We have several statically generated sites on netlify. Each one is tied to a repo with a single git user. They all use netlifycms. We have 3 content contributors who edit content on sites using their own git logins to the netlifycms. This cost us $20 a month for a couple years for the single netlfy account with a couple team seats.

With the git contributor change from netlify, we now have to pay neltify for each of those content contributor git logins to use the netlify cms. We now pay $60 per month for what was $20 before and we’ve not changed anything on our end.

I understand got to make profits somehow. We’ll be leaving netlify and netlifycms unfortunately due to this cost change and wanting to get many more users editing in the cms - then each new cms user becomes a “git contributor” that we’ll have to pay $20/month for.

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@bmatthews is the cms user a git contributor if the account is not a git account but by netlify identity?

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I think there are no additional charges if git pushes that trigger deploys are already a member of your netlify team.

Here is some relevant docs cobbled from a couple different official pages:

When a non-team member triggers a build, a team Owner can choose to add them to the team as a Git Contributor. Git Contributors can trigger builds, deploys, or Deploy Previews through Netlify from a private Git repository. They do not have access to the Netlify app or your team’s Netlify workspace.

"What is not included there is what happens if you do not add them as a team member. In that case, we bill you for any Git Contributor that has deployed a site during the last billing cycle. At the end of the billing cycle, we remove the Git Contributor so that we don’t charge you for inactive users. If the Git Contributor later deploys again, let’s say 3 months later, we again bill you for them during that billing cycle.

Careful on that last one, my boss was just approving but not adding git contributor pull requests and then at the end of the billing cycle there was the same number of users in netlify but a much bigger bill due to them being removed by netlify - seems a bit shady.

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