
Tipe raises $2.1M seed round to build a customizable CMS for developers - tmvnty
https://tipe.io/blog/tipe-raises-seed
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solidasparagus
I can't find anything that explains what Tipe actually is. It's a plugin-
based, customizable SaaS?

Their GitHub page is some confusing bullshit where they seem to have taken the
repo of a completely unrelated Angular animation library that has been
inactive for 6 years and converted it to be Tipe, presumably to make it seem
as if Tipe has earned 2.1k stars when it was actually the Angular project that
earned those stars.

They claim to be open-source but I see zero source code. Maybe the source is
in one of the two different CLIs that seem to exist? But the one that actually
seems documented and usable hasn't had a commit in 10 months.

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Scotups
yea, you're absolutely right! I am the author of that said animation lib,
ngFx, from years ago. Was actually my first open source project. When we
started tipe years ago, we sunsetted that project and used the stars to
generate hype for tipe. We were way ahead of ourselves :). Because we're in
private release, all of our open source is private on github right now. Once
we're not longer in private release, it will be public.

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woah
Seems... questionable

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Scotups
I agree. We didn't intend to post on HN until everything was public. Someone
else posted it, so I'm here rolling with it.

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masonhensley
I think you are missing the point.

Seems questionable to repurpose the repo to leverage the stars regardless of
whether you posted it here or someone else did.

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Scotups
oh, yes, that was one of many mistakes we made early on. As we move to a
public release, that is on our list to clean up.

~~~
Ericson2314
GitHub should tie stars to commit hashes to avoid this sort of crap. Your
repos stars is calculated from the started commits that are in this repo but
not any it's forked from, on the default branch.

Still prone to abuse from transferring repo to credit somebody else, but the
original repo owner would have to sign off on the transfer at least.

~~~
Scotups
I am the original repo owner. I invite you all to try tipe for your selves.
Signup

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hpoe
Real Question Time: Assuming that CMSs are really Content Management Systems,
intended largely to serve relatively static content, and not be an app
development platform do we need another?

I'd say for 90% of people Wordpress for all its problems is fine, if someone
is technical and wants more control and customization well really at that
point Jekyll is pretty powerful, and if you want fancier you've got Gatsby or
whatever the JS flavor of the month CMS is.

Is there a shortage of tools to allow me to publish a webpage? Is the problem
of creating and publishing a website so hard that we need a new entrant to
solve the problem? How much more complicated can it get then "Here is HTML,
CSS and JS put it on a webserver."?

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john-shaffer
It's often a requirement that non-devs be able to edit the website. WordPress
is okay if you have a site that you don't really care about and isn't worth
hacking, or if you can afford to pay Wordfence $99/mo and take the time to
make it reasonably performant.

Gatsby is not a CMS. It would be very nice to have a well-designed and
supported CMS that is actually secure and efficient by default.

> How much more complicated can it get then "Here is HTML, CSS and JS put it
> on a webserver."?

My favorite so far is the combination of WordPress and Gatsby in such a way
that you get the worst of both worlds. E.g. building a single page requires
creating 10-20 posts in WP, with zero ability to see what changes will look
like without actually deploying the site. All this complexity instead of just
setting rel="preload".

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tdeck
> WordPress is okay if you have a site that you don't really care about and
> isn't worth hacking

Unfortunately all sites are worth hacking to host phish kits (fake login pages
for phishing), and hosting one will get your website added to browser warn
lists and flagged by search engines. There seem to be automated bots scanning
for vulnerable WordPress sites so it's possible to become a target without
much attention from the attacker.

~~~
john-shaffer
This is true, but I would hope that readers here know enough to at least keep
WordPress up-to-date. Most attacks target old exploits. There are millions of
small WordPress sites that may never get hacked if they stay updated. If you
become big enough, however, you become a much more likely target for zero-
days. In that case, you probably don't want to be running WordPress any more
than you want to be running Windows.

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Scotups
Hey HN!

I'm Scott Moss, CEO of Tipe (YC W18). We actually just saw that someone posted
us on HN. So here to just drop a little bit about Tipe. Tipe is a headless,
open-source CMS with a focus on Jamstack apps. Our goal is to have the
quickest setup to allow your team to edit, preview, and publish content. We
also want to enable you to customize and extend your CMS to fit your team's
needs. You can even reuse components you already created in your app to
customize tipe. The sky is the limit. We handle the API and infrastructure.
We're currently in a Private release and are looking for teams who are using
Next.js. If that's you, please sign up!

~~~
jmvoodoo
Hi Scott,

I'm not in this industry anymore but used to work for a company that provides
CMS to fortune 500s. A significant portion of our customers used angular (not
angularjs). Are you planning on supporting that as well or remaining react
focused?

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Scotups
Absolutely, my career started with Angular and my co-founder created Angular
Universal. We have big plans with Angular. You can actually use Tipe with any
framework or platform, we're just focusing on our deep integrations one
framework at a time for now it get it magical.

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shiftpgdn
Can anyone in plain English explain the advantage of JAMstack over the typical
nodejs or LAMP stack? All I seem to get is jargon filled press releases from
companies with millions of dollars of venture capital.

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jameslk
One offloads a large portion of rendering to the browser where as the other
does it mostly on the server. Less processing on the server means less server
costs. The former results in an API that can usually be repurposed more easily
by other types of clients, such as Android and iOS apps. Also the API can
usually be anything that responds to a HTTP request, such as Firebase,
PostgREST, or even Airtable's API. Since the rendering is handled in the
browser, the frontend can be placed any server that serves up static HTML,
CSS, JS and images. Usually this is a CDN.

Of course all these things are really trade-offs. It's arguably much easier
just to throw together some PHP and stick it on some LAMP shared hosting if
that meets your needs. Or if you're more comfortable with server side
languages, you'll be a fish out of water. If you don't know why you would need
it, you probably don't.

~~~
shiftpgdn
That makes sense. But isn't that punishing to lower end hardware users? Also
aren't you moving much more data back and forth to do that?

~~~
jameslk
> That makes sense. But isn't that punishing to lower end hardware users?

Yes, and the punishments will continue until hardware improves. More
seriously, this is definitely a big trade-off. That's why page weight has been
growing over time and client side metrics haven't been getting much better
_despite_ improved hardware and connection speeds. There's no free lunch. As
I've mentioned in past comments, now's a great time to be a web performance
consultant.

> Also aren't you moving much more data back and forth to do that?

Considering that usually the bulk of the frontend arrives once and then gets
cached/runs continuously, I would say generally no. Server side rendering
requires the page to be sent in whole on each request, unless you're doing
some funky hybrid stuff with partial server rendering.

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davidlumley
What's the unique thing about Tipe compared to other headless CMS products
like Contentful?

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Scotups
Here are just a few things:

1\. Our frontend editor, where you edit content, is open-source. You can add
new field types with react components easily. 2\. The editor is also mounted
on your site and lives there wherever you want. So, yousite.com/cms. We handle
auth as well. 3\. You define your schema in your code, like a DB schema,
instead of in a GUI. Your schema lives in git with your app. 4\. You can get
started completely from the CLI, never touching a web app. 5\. You can extend
your schemas with plugins from the community. 6\. We give your features like
content previews right out the box with no code setup.

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jorams
I'm sorry for the somewhat unproductive comment, but for anyone else
wondering: Their homepage actually has an explainer below the title and the
community reviews aren't empty gray blocks. They've just used a font weight of
100, making the text effectively invisible.

~~~
Scotups
thanks for that, just pushed a fix

~~~
jorams
Great, thanks! Very readable now.

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js4ever
Wow, it's quite impressive to raise that much money without a public product.
Congrats!

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former_cms_dude
i used to work in enterprise cms implementations. a couple of thoughts:

\- in my experience most cms implementations are handled by a partner or
vendor with some expertise. few businesses have the direction/leadership in
place to hire a few devs of the intended cms and start hacking away.

\- if you are targeting enterprise you need to market to C-level (or slightly
below) marketing people, not devs. marketing holds the keys here and any
technical people are usually just along for the ride.

\- non-cms content (coming from business systems/integrations) will come into
play quickly, figure out a simple blueprint to extend the cms object model to
account for this.

\- though these were enterprise setups they were usually way off the mark by
the time we talked to actual system users. think multiserver architecture,
requirements to edit the most obscure content that will never be touched after
launch, integrations that dont make sense, access to inaccessible data, etc.
probably 30% of the time it should've been something simpler like wordpress,
netlifyCMS, etc., 30% should have been static content, 20% should have been
completely custom and 20% were actually a good fit for the cms.

\- set up examples of common site layouts/components and a WYSIWYG
implementation for each. non technical users will expect to be able to change
EVERYTHING and page templates quickly turn into a mess trying to keep it all
together. episerver has a pretty good system for this IMO.

~~~
Scotups
Some good info there, thanks. I'll take note.

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smabie
> Cloud computing, crawlers, and JavaScript have all approved and come
> together to enable this shift

Is this a typo?

~~~
Scotups
no, but hearing it here it sounds so jargony! I don't like it and I wrote it.
I'll do another pass, thanks.

