Is this project dead?

I am looking forward to the fork of the project on November 30th

With hopefully a great participation of those who are waiting for their PR to be validated since all this time

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Hello @anon40804151 and @geotrev! :wave:t6: Welcome to the forums! :netliconfetti: I appreciate the feedback you have provided on this topic. We have raised this discussion with product and look forward to providing an update soon.

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Hi @SamO thank you for the update and raising this discussion with product. Any updates you can share so far? NetlifyCMS is truly loved by clients because of its simplicity and live previews. Best from Amsterdam

so forestry.io is getting sunset so that’s out. I set one of my clients up on Netlify CMS for their Jekyll site. I wanted to check if this CMS would suffer a similar fate under the erratic sways of JAMstack development and here we are :slightly_frowning_face:

@Roneo.org that’s an excellent question. I’m shopping for a CMS for my Jekyll builds I did for a bunch of non-profits. I built a site with Netlify CMS after forestry announced their end of life but I really want to be sure I’m setting people for success.

Hey folks,

We have already promised, in this thread (here: Is this project dead? - #44 by hillary) that we will not remove the code from GitHub nor change its license in a way to limit its use.

We have also already promised, also in this thread (here: Is this project dead? - #50 by hrishikesh) that we intend to keep the auxiliary services to allow you to continue to use our CMS (or others) on our service running for the foreseeable future.

Finally, we are aware and excited that community members have forked the CMS (see https://staticjscms.netlify.app/ for more details), and begun development on it once again, as you can tell from looking at the codebase for our CMS that maintenance is basically at a standstill: Commits · netlify/netlify-cms · GitHub

While Netlify is still considering the future of the codebase, and someone above my pay grade will come announce our future intentions someday in this thread (once they are decided), I think you can read between those lines that your best bet today would likely be to use the fork. This of course will come with the expectations of support that come with a package maintained by a third party with whom you have no financial relationship, so you have to decide if that works well for your business or not.

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can you at least indicate in the readme that currently nobody is maintaining the project (and maybe even point to the fork)?

Ready for merge @fool : Update README.md with notice that this repository maintenance has been halted. by talves · Pull Request #6647 · netlify/netlify-cms · GitHub

I don’t have high enough permission to overwrite the merge block.

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Hey all thanks for your patiences on this our dev team is looking into this request. (:

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I want to note - anyone considering using the staticccms fork should read this comment and the thread surrounding it: Create NetlifyCMS to StaticCMS Migration Guide · Issue #46 · StaticJsCMS/static-cms · GitHub

My two cents: the fork is a fantastic and commendable effort, but it’s a complete rewrite, removes a huge number of features, will never even attempt be kept in sync with the original, and most important of all - is made by a solo developer without many other OSS projects that I’m aware of, with no financial backing, for a church website. It would be a big risk for most teams to rely on it for a production use case.

If all of that is fine for your use case, then go ahead. But the Netlify team shouldn’t point to it on their repo. It’s not a like for like replacement and an official mention would give the wrong impression that it’s safe for production use.

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Sorry to be late to reply but I’m happy to lay out the main pain points for you and others. I realize that the answer to the thread topic “is it dead?” has been answered Yes so I’m no longer looking for support, just sharing for the sake of it.

  • Upgrading Gatsby to 4 is blocked by a problem with static pathing in their sourcing plugins, never solved Graph fails to query images · Issue #36432 · gatsbyjs/gatsby · GitHub

  • As @mfan noted, the way Netlify now requires GitHub contributor seats led to unforeseen monthly costs

  • We also had to solve one MAJOR technical lack of NetlifyCMS: graphql type generation. We rolled our own custom script that parses the YAML and generates typings that Gatsby can use for its graph. Without this, you can still use the CMS but in a large project with a complex schema you’ll need to automate it at some point. Whoever is writing that Static CMS hopefully has realized this and addressed it for Gatsby.

On the bright side all the CMS ever did to our codebase was add a bunch of static markdown files and static assets. So simply discontinuing use of it in the future won’t break the code, it will just eliminate the CMS admin frontend. But that’s preferable to something like Contentful where the entire codebase ends up wrapped around their specific data format. Porting to another CMS in the future is still feasible.

Sorry to see this project put on ice, we really liked it!

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@creativiii @teamcrisis thanks for the suggestion, this seems like a helpful strating point for people in this thread Netlify CMS Migration Guide - Static CMS.

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Successfully switched my Gatsby project from Netlify CMS to Static CMS. Had to write some custom email templates due to the lack of routing. But other than that, it’s working super smoothly.

The steps I took were:

  1. Removed gatsby-plugin-netlify-cms
  2. Removed netlify-cms-app
  3. Added @staticcms/app
  4. Added gatsby-plugin-static-cms

Granted by default if someone tries to reset the password or if you send someone an invite, the URL doesn’t contain /admin/ so they won’t be automatically redirected to admin. So I had to roll my own using a custom email template. Granted that’s a pro-level feature, but to me, it was worth it.

You can use the static folder in Gatsby to write your templates. :slight_smile:

Otherwise you can just tell whomever to manually just add the /admin/ to the URL.

StaticCMS is, as far as I can tell, identical to Netlify CMS. My yml file and identity worked fine.

Working on a YouTube video documenting the process.

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Hi @haydn5 :wave:t6: welcome to the forums! Thanks so much for sharing this insight. I’m eagerly awaiting your youtube video. This is cool as heck. :slightly_smiling_face:

Thanks! Long time listener, first time caller, as it’s said on the radio. Big fan of all things Netlify.

I should have the video up in the next few days. With all of the relevant links as well.

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If you can instead switch nextjs, then you’d instead use contentlayer

Great news :grin: The project is not dead anymore! We are honoured to continue the path of Netlify CMS as Decap CMS. Read more at Netlify’s blog and our rebranded website:

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:tada: :tada: :tada:
Yessss ! I’m glad this project is not left to die, this cms is unique in the ecosystem ! Good luck to the team at PM. And thanks to the people who stood up to save the project !

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Almost can’t believe it, this is great news! Very happy that it’s getting picked up again! Last thing I wanted to do was completely move to yet another static CMS solution haha

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This has been one of the better ones I’ve used, Decap CMS