Replacing Forestry

Leaving forestry

In a post a few days ago I noted my search for a replacement for forestry, which is the CMS I currently use to write my posts. I went through all the Jamstack CMSs that used a git backend to store the content. Unfortunately none of them really met my requirements. The most important one being that it is free, as in beer. I was even willing to compromise on that, but the price points of some of the better ones were simply too high for a hobbyist like me.

So I am left with the replacement of forestry, tina.io. However, that CMS is so focused on React based CMSs and I am using Eleventy as my static site generator. So I will always feel like a second class citizen there. Right now there is no direct migration path between the two and whilst I am happy to wait and see what will happen in this regard, I have decided to look for other alternatives, even if they are not a fully fledged CMS.

Github.dev

I came across github.dev whilst making basic edits to a markdown page. This is a slimmed down version of Visual Studio Code, running in your browser with access to your repository. You access it from your repository by pressing ".". The great thing is that it has some basic markdown preview functionality which means that I can view me edits live before committing them. Clearly this is not the same as forestry, which provides far more functionality, but at the root of it forestry is only editing text configuration files. This is useful if you are not technical or are working in a team, but for me the added value is little - even if it simplifies certain things, a lot. For example managing images.

I have decided to give this a go for the forseeable future. This is my first post written entirely from github.dev. The live preview is good so far. In fact it looks like this: