
Forestry.io - achairapart
https://forestry.io/
======
chrsstrm
If I were you, I would rethink your "beta invite" flow. Adding an email
address and clicking on the "Request Invite" button doesn't send you an
invite, it adds you to their MailChimp newsletter list and sends an email
asking you to confirm your address (for opt-in). There is no invite code or
protected page, anyone can just go to
[https://forestry.io/beta](https://forestry.io/beta) to sign up. Don't trick
me into opting in to your newsletter when what you promised was a beta trial.
Give me access and let me test drive it; if I like the service I'll sign up
for your newsletter, I'll follow you on Twitter and I'll pay money for a
subscription. If you pull a bait and switch on me I'll move on.

~~~
jpatters
Co-creator here. We certainly didn't intend for this feeling and have removed
the Mailchimp form. There is now just a direct link to the signup page.

The people that signed up to the beta invite list will not be subscribed to
our newsletters unless they sign up to Forestry and choose to opt into our
newsletter. Mailchimp was simply an easy way for us to manage a list of people
interested in the service. Having the list and not linking to forestry.io/beta
was just our way of saving development effort. We were merely creating an
artificial control over who could sign up.

Rest assured that any users that have not signed up to Forestry and opted into
newsletters will be sent nothing but an invite to the beta.

~~~
tenkabuto
Could you please add a newsletter sign-up link or form?

------
oftenwrong
Not a very descriptive headline. I see many headlines like this on Hacker News
with just a name, and I often skip over them. Give people some information to
draw them in, and to assure them it will not be a waste of time. All I can
assume at this point is that your site is about forestry.

Edit: I have looked at the site, and indeed it has nothing to do with
forestry. You would do well to include in the headline the straightforward
description that is already in use on the page:

"Forestry: A simple CMS for Jekyll and Hugo sites"

~~~
ckdarby
I agree. I'm always confused how non-descriptive stories make it to the
frontpage of HN though...

~~~
sciurus
Getting friends to upvote their submissions, I'd guess.

~~~
jpatters
I wish. This took us by surprise. We didn't know it was submitted until it was
already on the front page.

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sgallant
Co-creator here. I was building a website for someone last summer and I REALLY
didn't want to use WordPress, so my friend and I built forestry.io.

Some highlights:

• Supports all Jekyll plugins

• Integrates with GitHub & Bitbucket (commits back to your repo)

• Zero configuration for you project

• Hosting not provided (deploy to S3, Github Pages, FTP)

• Use Markdown or WYSIWYG

I'd love to know what you think if the concept. Get in touch at
scott@forestry.io if you have any specific needs.

Thanks!

~~~
aug-riedinger
I agree that the project not being open-source _is_ a great no-go.

You guys should consider replicating the Wordpress model: open-source tools
and paid plans for hosting & support.

Don't think that S3 or github pages are too simple for a user to being
autonomous in deployment. IMHO typical use case for your product is a tech
guyssetting things up for some non tech people to administrate and write
content afterwards.

This means the keys are : \- 0 tech steps in administration (no git push, no
jekyll generate etc.) \- plugins \- plugins \- plugins \- themes \- plugins

But clearly if this can become an alternative to WP, this is great because
devs hate WP and it scales really bad, while static websites is the complete
opposite.

~~~
anticopernicus
I totally agree, although i would pay money for this code. Not being able to
modify it makes it unusable in a custom jekyll setup.

------
mablap
Looks good!

Can I buy the software and run it locally? I'm extremely interested for a
client, but there is no way they will surrender ownership of their content to
a third party - and I sadly won't suggest they do.

I assume they could pay 150-300 bucks for a single-site license and something
like 5-6 pages. Their website is very small. Honestly, cook up a license with
per n-page fees and I'm sure you'll sell a bunch.

~~~
Svenstaro
You should probably look into
[https://www.getlektor.com/](https://www.getlektor.com/) which does exactly
this but you can host it yourself.

------
kjaer
This is great! I have a bit of feedback though:

\- Does it really need access to my private repos too? I don't get to only let
it see public repos? There's a reason some of my repos are private, and I
don't really feel comfortable letting a third-party accessing them.

\- It's a bit weird that my posts are listed in reverse chronological order.

\- Having a way do add a description and required formatting (string, date,
int...) to the different YAML Frontmatter fields would be great. Prose.io
supports this, for instance, and I think that this is hugely important for
non-technical users.

\- Why don't I get to see and/or edit the date of my posts?

~~~
jpatters
GitHub's api permissions aren't very granular. We can choose between all
public repos, or all public and private repos. A lot of our users have their
site in a private repo as it is for an internal wiki or simply a site they are
still developing. Giving the user the ability to choose between all public and
all public and private complicates the flow, especially if you chose all
public when you started and then later want to access a private repo. This is
something that we will take into consideration as the the product grows
though.

Your posts should be listed with the most recent first. This seems to be
pretty standard across content management systems. However, we will have
sorting out into production soon.

I'm not 100% certain what you mean with regards to frontmatter. Right now,
when you create a new page/post the fields that show up are determined by the
frontmatter defaults (in Jekyll) or the archetype (in Hugo). The type of data
that a field accepts is derived from the content in existing fields. We are
working on giving the user the ability to change the content type of a given
field and to add additional frontmatter fields.

The fields are derived from the frontmatter in a content file. If the content
file has a date field in frontmatter, you will see a date field. I realize
that Jekyll incorporates the date into the name of the content file so you may
not have a reason to add a date field to frontmatter. I'll add that to my todo
list.

------
rubiquity
I've thought about building this a million times. For the people that don't
understand it, it's web UI managed Jekyll that takes those web changes and
puts them into git/github (presumably GitHub) so that you get the auto-deploy
feature of Jekyll based GitHub pages. Kudos and good luck.

~~~
sgallant
Thanks!!

------
sippeangelo
"Forestry". Really? I can understand many other hot startups using names of
random objects, but using the name of an entire completely different
profession?

~~~
Cerium
I was excited at the prospect of an API service offering up to date forestry
data.

~~~
LogicX
Checkout my friends' startup [http://TREELY.co](http://TREELY.co)

------
quaffapint
Is this like how [http://prose.io/](http://prose.io/) is with github? I've
been using that and it works ok, though sometimes things don't seem to take
the first time.

~~~
kmfrk
Basically, but without the customization.

------
ljoshua
Ooh, looks nice. I assume it's going to be a service though? Anyone know of
similar style products out there that are self-hosted or open source? I have
several scenarios where it would be great to tie together a static repo, an
on-demand CMS like this, and the pushed final product, just like this looks
like it will do.

Requested access though, looking forward to seeing more.

~~~
jonkiddy
I had the same thought. I found this a moment ago.

[https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms](https://github.com/netlify/netlify-
cms)

Edit/Addendum: I think this is an interesting service. For what it's worth,
I'd rather pay someone to host this type of content with a SLA of some sort.

------
killercup
This reminds me: About a year ago I wrote down [1] some ideas I had about a
static site generator that defines its structures in JSON schema (or something
alike). It then uses this type information to validate the correct usage in
all templates and inputs, as well as to generate a UI for editing. I'm pretty
sure this idea is still a few steps ahead of any product/OSS I've seen in this
space. Sadly, I've only ever implemented a simple prototype.

So, if anyone wants to give that a go, I'd be happy to see this implemented!

[1]: [https://pascalhertleif.de/artikel/silicon-
zucchini/](https://pascalhertleif.de/artikel/silicon-zucchini/)

~~~
edude03
That sounds sort of like Contentful (not affiliated in anyway, but came up
when I was looking for a "content storage as a service" type thing.

------
calcipher
Are there any advantages to this over cloudcannon? They seem very similar.

~~~
bg0
Would love to hear a reply to this since this is your biggest likely
competitor.

------
duffy0
Looks a lot like SiteLeaf.com to me.

~~~
ryanSrich
This was my initial thought as well. We used siteleaf for around 6 months
until we outgrew it.

~~~
sethjgore
What were the factors that caused you to outgrow it? I'm curious

~~~
ryanSrich
At 300+ pages the compile time became an issue. We started to build very
custom layouts that didn't necessarily lend themselves to a typical CMS. On
top of that we trasitioned our core marketing content to hubspot, while our
highly directed pages remained static.

~~~
sgallant
You should try Hugo. It's lightning fast.

------
vikeri
Any plans on supporting Gitlab and Gitlab Pages? Would also be stoked if it
was open source, I'd probably still pay for the service but just knowing that
it is OSS and that I could tweak it myself would be great.

~~~
jpatters
We will certainly be adding support for Gitlab. It is not open source right
now. But it is something we are considering in the future.

~~~
vikeri
Great!

------
aaggarwal
I'm using mobile and the adding website flow is smooth and concise. I
connected my blog hosted on GitHub. The only caveat is that this requires
permission to access everything on your GitHub account, public and private
repositories, and permission to do anything with them.

However, after adding the website repository, I'm not able to see any posts,
is this only for pages? There are some UI issues with page editor on mobile
that can be sorted out in beta. Nice product!

Update: I can access posts after changing the URL, but a direct link is
missing in the UI.

~~~
jpatters
Unfortunately GitHub doesn't give great control over permissions. The only
thing we can choose from is access to all public repos, or access to all
public and private repos. We can't specify that we want only the user repos
and not the organization or vice versa.

I will certainly have a look at the issue you are having. Could you contact us
via our support tool on the site? Or email us at support at forestry.io.

------
vortico
I was actually looking for a CMS I could use for my dad's forestry company. I
could set up the server and design, and he could log in to change the content.

~~~
jpatters
Forestry on Forestry?

------
greggman
Well I didn't want to post this on HN but I can't find any contact info in
your site nor your HN profile so ....

The mobile landing page plays the video on touchstart which makes it hard to
scroll through the page since any touch of the thumbnails, even just for the
purpose of scrollong, starts the videos :(

~~~
jpatters
Thanks. We will fix that.

------
type0
I went there to read some forestry information and I couldn't see the wood for
all the trees!

------
kfk
You might want to do a comparison vs wordpress. I would love to use another
cms system, but wp is not only wp, it is an ecosystem of products for building
websites, how does forestry compare to that? Can forestry reduce my
development cost for custom solutions?

~~~
jpatters
You are right, Wordpress is not just Wordpress. And the obvious thing that we
are missing is the plugin ecosystem that Wordpress has.

That being said, if you can do without plugins, I would highly recommend using
a static site generator as it can reduce your development cost as well as your
management cost. There is no backend to build and no server to manage.
Forestry is a tool to allow you to take advantage of the benefits of a static
site generator from a development and management perspective, and still allow
your clients/users to be able to manage their content.

------
carloselhalabi
I looked up -not so- real quick for your code on Github, without luck. Are you
NOT open source?

------
kmfrk
This looks great! I'd probably only use it for a real project, if it came with
more fine-grained permissions, though. I wouldn't want writers or editors to
control pages and chunks, for instance.

Still the best Jekyll CMS I've seen.

~~~
jpatters
We are working on permissions. Ideally, what would you like to see?

~~~
kmfrk
Awesome.

Probably an Admin/Editor/Writer hierarchy where admins can manage both Posts,
Pages, and Chunks, and Editors can edit all writers' posts, whereas Writers
can only create posts and edit their own. Perhaps Writers could also be
restricted to only submitting a post for publication, which the editor could
then pull the trigger on.

Chunks are really interesting, but I feel that permissions should be more
granular. They're great to collate information about the writers (bio,
Twitter, e-mail), but they should probably only be able to edit their own
field.

~~~
jpatters
Thanks for the feedback. I've added your comments to our other thoughts on
permissions.

------
112percent
Good job. The UI looks really nice. The ability to upload it to lots of
different endpoints allows for so much flexibility.

I've just uploaded a Jekyll site, but it failed, the error message could have
been more descriptive.

~~~
jpatters
Thanks for the feedback. We are working on making our error messages better.

------
ehnto
Just out of narcissistic curiosity, I would be interested to know where you
got the design inspiration from. It looks super similar to one of my services,
although you have executed it with more polish!

------
b34r
It's like the heavens have been listening to me! I've been studying static
site generators and needing a non-technical editing solution... Looks like
this might fit the bill.

------
andrei_says_
Plans for middleman support?

~~~
steffoz
Although our solution is a bit different, we support it!
[http://datocms.com](http://datocms.com)

We plan to officially launch our ShowHN within a couple of weeks, so sorry if
the marketing site and the documentation is not 100% ready.. but the product
is already working, you can signup and start playing with it immediately :)

------
Ilinizas
Love it! Keep up the great work.

