
Show HN: GraphCMS – A GraphQL-based Headless CMS - mlukaszczyk
https://graphcms.com/blog/new-graphcms-ready-for-launch
======
ericfrederich
>> Can I host GraphCMS on my own servers? >> Please talk to sales to discuss
deployment options.

This is not an answer. Talk to sales?

I don't mind paying for support. I'm not a fan of paying for enterprise
features. I would never want a dependency to something which is not free.

~~~
mlukaszczyk
Our new architecture allows much more flexibility on the deployments, so just
speak to us about your favorite setting. However, it is quite complex and we
rather focus on delivering a high quality cloud infrastructure that works for
everyone. I can understand your perspective but our mantra is to remain a SaaS
company, which means to be able to focus on ONE code base. This allows us on
delivering a higher quality product in the long run so all users can benefit
from it.

~~~
heisnotanalien
So basically no?

~~~
mlukaszczyk
So basically, lets talk.

------
les
The scary thing to me is if a service like this stops, I have an angry client
and a lot of work. Headless CMS's are a delight to work with though.

~~~
jonheller
Exactly. Or drastically changes their pricing model (see: Contentful).

I understand the benefits of all of these individual services, but I also miss
the days of the only service I had to worry about when I handed off a client
site was hosting.

Now it's often the headless CMS hosting (i.e. Contentful, GraphCMS), actual
hosting (Netlify), CDN, Image CDN, Search (i.e. Algolia). So many places for
things to break. So many separate charges.

I also love headless CMS's but much prefer self-hosted ones. Directus has been
a favorite to experiment with so far.

~~~
artpar
Checkout daptin if you are looking for an open source self hosted solution for
headless cms

[https://github.com/daptin/daptin](https://github.com/daptin/daptin)

------
ksec
Excuse my ignorance, and I don't mean to troll.

Why would I want a "Headless" CMS?

Why would I want a CMS based on GraphQL?

What is wrong, with plain old HTML?

~~~
djhartman
> Why would I want a "Headless" CMS?

Perhaps your CMS serves multiple front ends: a website, or a mobile app.

> Why would I want a CMS based on GraphQL?

The way I see it, the CMS is not based on GraphQL, it's just a CMS that you
can query with GraphQL. I haven't used GraphQL at all, but it seems like it
could be useful for working within a system where you need to bring data from
many different REST endpoints together. Usually I would have to hand code
something like this myself on the backend, but with GraphQL it seems like once
you have it all set up, you can get data from multiple APIs, while specifying
the schema of your response on the client instead of on the backend.

> What is wrong, with plain old HTML?

Nothing, if you can build what you want to build with "plain HTML" then do it.

~~~
anothergoogler
"Headless" is a weird term for an HTTP API.

~~~
djhartman
It's describing the CMS, not the API. It's not so familiar to software
engineer types, but is pretty well understood in publishing / Drupal /
WordPress space.

------
neeksHN
It'd be rather refreshing if one of the headless CMS PaaS solutions could
follow an open model similar to WordPress/Gitlab

~~~
mlukaszczyk
Hey! I'm one of the co-founders of GraphCMS.

We will soon start open sourcing our content management interface, so users
have the opportunity to customize the CMS UI to their needs. Most of our
customers just want us to take care of the hosting.

~~~
tcc8
Can you compare pros/cons to Contentful?

~~~
mlukaszczyk
GraphCMS is the only CMS that exclusively offers GraphQL. Other CMSs have
since entered the space to offer GraphQL technology, but they still try to
maintain both REST and GraphQL APIs which will lead to some maintenance issues
in the future. An example of this is that the other CMSs aren’t able to offer
a “mutation” API for their CMS through GraphQL. With our CMS you can query the
data and change it through the same powerful interface. This opens the door to
a wide range of tooling and custom workflow enhancements. Additionally,
because we only offer GraphQL, we are able to be more agile with changes to
the technology.

In the future, our focus will shift even more to content based BaaS as we will
support end user authentication. We are also preparing a new suite of workflow
tools that will make managing large datasets a breeze.

------
intrasight
I reviewed the site. I still have no idea what GraphCMS does.

~~~
mlukaszczyk
TLDR; It allows you to bring content to any platform.

It allows you to build content databases in an easy and visual manner. Once
you have your content in GraphCMS, you are able to fetch it in an elegant way
by using GraphQL. The target platforms that consume the content can be
anything: web, mobile, alexa skills or just business partners you want to
share digital content with so that they can put it on the target platform of
their choice.

------
iDemonix
Do people really care about the library used to build their CMS? Surely this
will only appeal to those that already use GraphQL...

~~~
motleydev
It's about the language front-to-back. The language that builds the CMS is
also the language that you build your sites with! So you keep the overhead low
on various technologies being used. Yes, GraphQL users are the primary people
drawn to the app, but that's sort of true for any platform?

------
some_developer
Just the other day I learned about [https://github.com/unite-cms/unite-
cms/](https://github.com/unite-cms/unite-cms/) .

Though obviously GraphCMS is different (technology-wise and business-wise it
seems).

------
shazzy
Looks great, excited to try it out. Just skimming through the Documentation,
is there any way to specify the Schema through an API? My use case that I want
to define my schema somewhere, and have something which "syncs" the it with
GraphCMS, is this possible?

~~~
mlukaszczyk
You could use the management API for this. It's basically the same API the
content management interface also speaks to. You can open up the API explorer
and switch to the management API in the top bar and play around with it!

(fyi: the documentation is not released, yet)

------
jotschi84
Gentics Mesh can also be used with GraphQL and REST (e.g. for File Uploads).
GraphQL is (imho) no silver bullet.

[https://getmesh.io](https://getmesh.io)

------
intrasight
Isn't any database with a GraphQL interface a superset of a "headless CMS"?
And the subset is just a particular schema?

------
hirundo
mlukaszczyk,

Is GraphCMS a Graphcool service? I see their style of sorting and filtering in
your API. If so, what's your experience with Graphcool, and what value does
GraphCMS add?

~~~
mlukaszczyk
Hey Hirundo,

the former GraphCMS was built on top of Graphcool, with the new system, we
also move to Graphcool's new product, Prisma, which is a setting we enjoy a
lot. Prisma runs at the core for CRUD and then we add an additional API layer
to it to add the features we think make sense in a CMS context.

The value add depends on perspective. If you are looking for a tool to build a
content database, then GraphCMS brings definitely a lot to the table. While
you get the content management interface and tools, we add just enough opinion
to the APIs that makes sense in a context of building a content database.

Graphcool is also not actively maintained anymore as the team is now focusing
on Prisma.

The Demo-API on the landing page is from the former stack. We will soon add a
new example to showcase all the new API utils.

------
sbr464
How are you currently handling subscriptions or live updates/polling?

------
weego
Graphql is not a product pitch. I don't care. Even your product page just
shows an editor that looks like a WordPress article. Why do I need graphql to
pull an article from a remote api to my local cache? Your front page is just
reasons why graphql is good. Maybe so, but I'm sizing you up for a cms api for
my business, not a library. Technology itself is not a product

~~~
mlukaszczyk
GraphQL is fun on the frontend. On the backend, there is a gazillion things
that need to be considered. You can build a powerful GraphQL backend via the
GraphCMS UI.

So we leave you with the fun part.

This has proven very valuable to our users that don't want to implement the
backend part of things, while getting a content management interface for
editors.

------
maticzav
A must see for every frontend engineer working with GraphQL!

------
flossball
Pretty cool, but I can't help but feel really soon that browsers will just
implement a similar rich default GraphQL and there will be some CSS concept
for it when there is no full app code loaded.

~~~
michaelmior
What you're saying sounds intriguing, but I'm having a hard time understanding
what is you're expecting browsers to implement.

------
carterkwon
Can't wait to use the new version! I've been looking forward to a lot of the
new features.

~~~
motleydev
Great! Excited to see what your thoughts are on it!

