New era for the Coditis Blog

After a lot of trial & error, a CMS is finally here!


Winner of the CMS battle: Tina

This blog has been on hold for a while. Despite crafting a good looking design, there was still a fundamental flaw – posting something required effort. Having a markdown blog is nice, but it could only be done on my computer, the phone was out of the question. Secondly, I had to remember to git pull every time I wanted to post. Thirdly, Netlify CMS did not upload posts properly and I did not fully understand the image storage, and it took me way too much time to resolve it. I needed a more user-friendly CMS.

I decided to go with Tina CMS. As of now, it seems to meet all of my needs. I can edit my blog from a web interface, it has built in media storage and the configuration was relatively easy. Let's hope this encourages my writing habit.

Technical notes:

  • Tina has 2 modes: dev and prod. You first have run npx tinacms build in order to set up Tina for production. Without this step you’ll still be stuck in dev mode.
  • Tina Cloud requires some additional modifications:
    • You have to set up your .env file and change the Tina’s config file to use environment variables. It can be done semi-automatically using the npx @tinacms/cli init backend command.
    • In the package.json file, set up a custom build command: tinacms build && npm run build – figuring this out took me 2 hours.