HACKER Q&A
📣 datavirtue

Best headless CMS for a developer portal


I haven't really worked with a CMS since peak WordPress ten-plus years ago. Coming back to this and needing to create a developer portal to document complex API integrations for our clients I am looking for an open-source headless CMS that isn't going to make me pull my hair out. I want to self-host it as I have AWS and Azure available to me at work. Any suggestions for a modern CMS that you enjoyed using?


  👤 colesantiago Accepted Answer ✓
Just use WordPress seriously.

All the other CMS‘s are broken and don’t work properly when you upgrade them. I remember Strapi having this issue and most people I talked to would never use Strapi again.

With Wordpress you can easily transfer it to somebody else who knows WordPress and not some immature esoteric CMS system, nobody but the original developer who left the project knows about.

It’s one thing that a system is open source and it’s another if a lot of people knows about that system.


👤 solardev
(Disclaimer: I work for a headless CMS, but not an open source or self hostable one)

If you're primarily writing docs, have you considered a system for that (like Docusaurus) or a simple MDX (Markdown with JSX) system like Astro or Grav CMS?

The proper headless CMSes are good for managing complex schemas and relationships in a GUI. But if you're primarily documenting code and APIs, IMO being able to write freeform and easily add example snippets and maybe actually workable examples would be nice.

You can also make a pretty good headless CMS off WordPress by using Advanced Custom Fields. However, that was recently taken over by Automattic and part of their war against WPEngine. I'd be afraid of using it.


👤 sneek_
Check out Payload - fully OSS, modeled after the … few good parts of WP

https://payloadcms.com

I built it because I was in the same situation as you.