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Comment by imilk | Hacker News Reader

Directus is an amazing open source tool that you can self host as easy as deploying a Node app. You can setup content types with a nice UI, very configurable roles so a client can't break the site, a media library that can hook into S3/DO Spaces, a REST or Graphql API built in, webhooks, revisions, works with many different DBs, and a bit more I'm not thinking of.

I'm not affiliated with them at all. Was just very pleased to find how polished it is for a self hosted, free product compared to the other $499/mth proprietary options in the space.

https://directus.io/

https://github.com/directus/directus

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This looks amazing thank you. I'm curious about the REST API part. Have you used that before? How configureable is it? It sounds like a scaffold of some sort... but, what if I needed to do some custom data processing on the data before returning it in the API, are there hooks for that?

I'm not an expert since I used it for a few projects about a year ago. But the web hooks are mostly for when items are added/updated/deleted.

They have pretty useful API parameters for transforming images. But my initial instinct is to say that you'll have to do custom data processing in the front end or somewhere else, since the API it generates just mirrors the structure of your database. The nice thing about this approach is that you can always remove Directus from a project and your database will function as normal.

They also have pretty use docs which you can check out for your usecase:

https://docs.directus.io/reference/introduction/

edit: I should also add that you can add your own custom modules, but I never really explored that too much.

Hey prog5, you should check out Payload CMS if you need that type of flexibility and extensibility. Payload has Hooks that allow you to do exactly what you're saying.

Any links to how page building and live previews look?

You can make a page builder using it, but you're going to have to create content types for each block with many to many relationships to pages. It's not going to function like a WP page builder, but it also would allow you more control over what a client can add to a page.

Don't think there are live previews, but I might be wrong (people can create custom modules, like plugins, and I haven't checked in on it for a year or so).

One use case we made is a place where a non-tech savvy marketing manager at a chain of retail stores can enter/edit the store info & deals for each location. Then the info & deals then get updated on the stores' app, website, and on site displays from a single UI.

A basic feature all headless CMS's don't have is nested pages/documents. It is how the web works, so why have they all agreed to not have the feature?

Nesting is not necessary for the web to work.

Wikipedia/Wikimedia does not have nesting: each page/topic is its own top-level article without hierarchy. Meanwhile BookStack, another open source wiki platform, does have hierarchical organization.

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