
Ask HN: CMS for NGO? - anononom
My team is considering a bid for developing a site for a large US based NGO. We&#x27;ve worked on large CMS build-outs before using Drupal but aren&#x27;t really excited about using it again. We recently built a large site using the WordPress REST API consumed by a Nodejs front-end and were pleasantly surprised with process and results. It provided the client with a consistent interface for editing content and us with decent, modern, testable front-end tooling. Curious to hear fellow HN readers experiences with this domain &amp; similar tooling.<p>Also worth mentioning, I poked around the 18f.gsa.gov site to see if there were any similar projects but didn&#x27;t see anything. I saw a reference to Federalist but no links. From the description it sounds Jekyll-esqe so might not be flexible enough for our needs.
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jeremiak
Hey there, cool that you found Federalist! There's a blog post we wrote when
releasing it that might be helpful:
[https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/09/15/federalist-platform-
launch/](https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/09/15/federalist-platform-launch/) \- You
can find the homepage at
[https://federalist.18f.gov](https://federalist.18f.gov), but the majority of
the application is behind authentication so that might be only so useful.

For background, Federalist is tooling wrapped around Jekyll, AWS and Github so
that it feels like a CMS but you are actually editing a static site. In
building many Jekyll sites for our partner agencies (and for ourself as the
18F site is a Jekyll site) we found that the process of using and maintaining
a Jekyll site was very technical and required a great deal of context. So we
built Federalist to reduce the friction of using static sites.

It automates the following: * Setting up webhooks on the Github repository to
be notified of any changes * Building the site when it receives notifications
of a change and then pushing the site to an S3 bucket

On top of that it provides an editing interface for non-technical folks to
keep content up to date.

As always, its about tradeoffs and if the WordPress API route is working well
for you, I think that's a good one and I've personally heard a lot of great
things about the new API and consuming it with a smaller JS app/front end.
Personally, I prefer to work with static sites so that I don't have to concern
myself with database availability or stability as a single point of failure
for the site.

If you're looking for more information, I invite you to join our public slack
at [https://chat.18f.gov](https://chat.18f.gov) and entering the "federalist-
public" room. Hopefully see you there!

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exolymph
In my opinion, WordPress > Drupal.

