Looking for CMS

[ckiyme]

I'm starting to build a new website with Fresh and I'm really liking so far.

I was wondering if anyone has any reccomendation for a compatible/easy to setup CMS? In case anyone has already had a go at it.

[manimovassagh]

A few CMS options that work well with Fresh:

Headless CMS (API-based) — easiest path:

• Strapi — self-hosted, REST + GraphQL, generous free tier. You fetch content in your Fresh route handlers and render it server-side. Works out of the box since Fresh routes are just async functions that can fetch() anything.

• Sanity — hosted, real-time editing, excellent structured content model. Has a JS client that works fine in Deno:

  import { createClient } from "npm:@sanity/client";
  
  const client = createClient({
    projectId: "your-project-id",
    dataset: "production",
    useCdn: true,
    apiVersion: "2024-01-01",
  });
  
  // In your Fresh route handler:
  export const handler: Handlers = {
    async GET(_req, ctx) {
      const posts = await client.fetch(`*[_type == "post"] | order(_createdAt desc)`);
      return ctx.render({ posts });
    },
  };

• Contentful — very mature, great TypeScript SDK, works via npm:contentful.

• Directus — self-hosted, database-first approach (wraps any SQL database with a REST/GraphQL API + admin panel). Nice if you want full control over your data.

File-based / Git-based:

• Markdown files in your repo — Fresh doesn't have a built-in markdown pipeline, but you can use deno.land/x/front_matter + npm:marked (or npm:mdx-bundler) to parse .md files from a content/ directory. Simple, version-controlled, no external dependencies.

• Keystatic — from the Thinkmill team, stores content as files in your repo (JSON/Markdown) with a nice admin UI. It's React-based for the admin panel, but the content it produces is just files you can read from any framework.

My recommendation: If you want the smoothest setup with Fresh specifically, go with Sanity or Strapi — both have JS clients that work over npm: specifiers in Deno, and you just fetch data in your route handlers. No special plugins or adapters needed.

[ckiyme]

Well, if Strapi and Sanity are easy to implement, I might go for one of them. Thank you! ☺️

[predaytor]

I use Wordpress CMS (SQLite, GraphQL + Persisted Queries) with Cloudflare CDN + Cloudflare Purge API.

[AZIRARM]

Hi there!

I recommend giving Nodify Headless CMS a try. It works great with Fresh (or any other framework) since it's API-first and completely decoupled.

Why Nodify:

• 🔗 API-first — works with any frontend (Fresh, Next.js, React, etc.)
• 🐳 Easy to set up with Docker (docker compose up -d)
• 🌍 Native multilingual support
• 📦 Official clients for Node.js, Java, Python, and PHP
• 🔓 Fully open-source — self-hosted with no locked features

GitHub repo: https://github.com/AZIRARM/nodify

You can have it running locally in minutes. Perfect for a Fresh website!

Hope this helps! 👍