
Tina is not a CMS - sgallant
https://tinacms.org/blog/announcing-tinacms/
======
andretti1977
I love static sites and made some using Hugo. A year later i've started
working with WordPress and its ugly/nice (it depends) Gutenberg editor and to
be honest, having a look at the quality (yes, there are a lot of excellent
plugins and a lot of bad ones) and the availabilty of plugins,i think
WordPress is the only platform to go for business oriented websites where seo,
caching and other things matters a lot. I've been using wp on production and
i'm very happy with it and even if it's far from perfection, even common users
learn easily how to use it. Static site generators look like something build
for developers instead of non-developers users. What i really miss on
WordPress is the capability to produce a static site from a WordPress
installation and use netlify for hosting. I know there are some plugins for
that purpose but i still haven't tried them.

~~~
codegeek
So much this. We work with WordPress where our non tech savvy cllients have to
build a lot of content using page builders. I wish there was an easy way to
auto deploy most of the content as static while keeping the power of CMS
capability. We either have very User oriented CMSs including WordPress or
developer oriented tools like Gatsby/gridsome etc. Sorry but my B2B client is
not going to run a "gatsby build" on every new page or post creation.

The sweet spot worth billions would be WordPress type.CMS that auto deploys
static content while keeping dynamic features as needed. Caching plugins are
just too cumbersome even though they are an option.

~~~
marc_io
So you should try Publii CMS. It's a good use case for this. Very “client
oriented”. It can deploy static sites to Netlify, Github Pages, FTP, and so
on.

~~~
codegeek
But does it match WordPress in terms of functionality, plugin ecosystem, ease
of deployment etc?

~~~
marc_io
Regarding plugins and functionality, not really. But the deployment is easier
— and free. For simple sites, it's a real alternative.

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dwalkr
Myself and my colleagues have spent the last two months working on TinaCMS,
and have learned a lot along the way. We believe Tina is a novel solution for
managing website content.

For one thing, as the title of this post mentions, "Tina is not a CMS". Our
team also works on the Forestry.io CMS, so we know how to build one of those.
As we embarked on the Tina project, we felt that another one-size-fits-all CMS
wasn't the solution we wanted. This is why we architected Tina as a suite of
libraries to enable frontend devs to quickly compose a more form-fitting
content management strategy for their clients.

Another interesting innovation that we discovered along the way was that, by
having the CMS live on your website instead of in a traditional CMS dashboard,
the correlation between source content and rendered website becomes much more
intuitive to those who were not involved in developing the website to begin
with. With a traditional CMS, users must have some mental model of how their
site is composed. They can ultimately figure out that, for example, they can
change the homepage title by clicking on Settings > Homepage > Title or
something like that, but requires some trial and error and a lot of implicit
rules to remember. With Tina, the editor will edit the Homepage title while
viewing the homepage; the information will tend to be where they're expecting
it. And by having a short-feedback, on-page experience, even more esoteric
rules will reveal themselves more intuitively.

We have been thrilled so far with the response to the public release of this
project. We hope to continue to improve and extend the capabilities of
TinaCMS, and I'd like to thank everyone who has expressed their enthusiasm and
support!

------
BossingAround
Wow, this looks pretty amazing. I can totally see setting up a Gatsby site
with the Tina plugin as a website for small or medium businesses.

For me, personally, I'm happy with VCS-centric workflow... I push a change to
git, Netlify picks it up, and fires the build process automatically. I think
that'd need to be sovled for small businesses, as the changes are local only
(and considering that such a blog is very likely to be executed in a
container, that'd make no sense).

~~~
jpatters
> I think that'd need to be sovled for small businesses, as the changes are
> local only

This is exactly why we created Tina Teams
([https://tinacms.org/teams](https://tinacms.org/teams)). We will start
sending early access invites in 2 weeks.

------
glaberficken
>"using a CMS feels more like filing your taxes than editing a website"

Loved this quote. I've recently realized this when trying to get a family
member (millennial generation) to understand how to edit the simple website
she had created using wordpress.

~~~
chrismorgan
I’m guessing that quote was written by an American. For comparison, I filed my
Australian taxes on Friday. My tax affairs are admittedly fairly simple, but I
comfortably finished the whole process in under ten minutes including looking
up a few things for such items as deductions for my home office. Not all taxes
are hard, just as not all CMSes are hard.

~~~
ncphillips
The quote was more about the experience (i.e. just a long list of form fields
with no context) rather then about the difficulty.

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DirtyF
Live demo with a Gatsby website on stage at JAMstack Conf:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPDCmbaEF0Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPDCmbaEF0Y)

~~~
sgallant
Demo starts around 3:45
[https://youtu.be/iPDCmbaEF0Y?t=227](https://youtu.be/iPDCmbaEF0Y?t=227)

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r_singh
I'm currently using Netlify CMS on my Gatsby site for the blog bit. Any reason
I should switch to this?

~~~
jpatters
Tina is designed to give editors the live editing experience they want
(similar to a site builder like squarespace) while developers maintain control
over the project. NetlifyCMS is missing the former. They have their preview
templates but it is not an exact representation and requires extra work from
the developer.

Tina is also designed so that you can create the editing experience that your
customers/clients/coworkers need. Instead of a one-size-fits-all solution, you
can give them something that is tailored to their needs.

As well, at the moment Tina only works with git (similar to NetlifyCMS) but we
are working on other data source plugins as well (think Contentful, Headless
Wordpress, etc).

~~~
cormacrelf
The 'requires extra work from the developer' would be the main way to improve
on NetlifyCMS. You have to create a schema, and then translate the schema and
any changes into an editor component. How does Tina do it without this?

------
sgallant
Linkt to repo
[https://github.com/tinacms/tinacms](https://github.com/tinacms/tinacms)

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hapidjus
Napoleon Dynamite reference?

~~~
mistersquid
At risk of stating the obvious, "TinaCMS" is a recursive acronym similar to
GNU.

This doesn't necessarily prevent "Tina" from having another referent except
then "TinaCMS" wouldn't a recursive acronym.

~~~
netsharc
Interesting.. it works for every letter does it not? [_]ina[category]?

For 2 random examples.. LinaPhone, UinaBag

~~~
auxym
LAME: LAME ain't an MP3 encoder

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lunias
If Tina is "not a CMS", then what does "cms" stand for in your domain. Do you
have an alternate interpretation of that acronym?

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badrabbit
Wiki/documentation repo based on this would be interesting.

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xellisx
Surprised Craft CMS hasn't been brought up.

~~~
ncphillips
Tina maintainer here! There has been some thoughts around how Tina could be
used _with_ CraftCMS. Nothing concrete yet, but it's on our minds!

------
tillda
Is there a working online demo?

~~~
ncphillips
Checkout this gastby starter :)

[https://github.com/tinacms/gatsby-starter-
tinacms](https://github.com/tinacms/gatsby-starter-tinacms)

