Front Matter CMS
With the relaunch of Finley, I am. a couple of weeks ago I shifted from using a CMS to everything-is-code. My blogging days stretch back to the mid-2000’s and my having built my own blogging tool called Blog Wizard. Various versions of that powered several blogs until I launched Finley, I am. in 2015 on Ghost.
Simply put, I am used to having a CMS. Code is great, but certain things are nicer with a CMS. Managing data things, specifically. The week with the relaunch I had imported all the articles from Ghost 1-to-1. Same tags and everything else. Last Sunday I started refactoring the tags. Because everything-is-code and I realized that I could build something cool if my tags were better. As detailed in the linked article, I merged and deleted a ton of tags. Over 300 tags in over 400 posts.
That brings us to Front Matter CMS. First, it’s a plugin for VS Code. Many CMSs exist for SSGs like Astro that write code. This sits alongside your Markdown post, living in the sidebar of Code. For SEO-minded folks, it provides SEO status info— like title, slug, article length, keyword management, etc. For me, it’s the publishing date, draft status, and very much the tag management for articles I love. Autocomplete on tags will help you remain consistent on your tag use, which I then use for finding similar posts.
And it helps you manage. The Dashboard shows all published posts and easily helps you find and edit your drafts. Taxonomies? Yeah, merging, renaming, deleting, and more. And remember, everything-is-code, so changing merging “video” into “videos” results in 10 changed files that you then commit and push.
If you use Hugo, Jekyll, Astro, or other SSGs that use front matter for metadata around posts, go grab Front Matter CMS and give it a shot.