Migrate to TinaCMS #183
Description
We historically used forestry.io as our CMS for the DataONE website, but the creators of forestry started deprecating it and shifted focus to a brand new system called TinaCMS. Initially, Tina focused on other frameworks like Gatsby and the support for Hugo was minimal. TinaCMS was also not very stable and the migration path seemed arduous.
I checked today and it looks like there's been a lot of progress since then! Tina has full support for Hugo, as well as a guide for migrating from forestry. It's fully open-sourced and has had a 1.0 release. Formally run by a small team based in Nova Scotia, Tina has more recently been acquired by SSW, a larger multi-national org that's still dedicated to open-source. Overall, it seems like a good time to revisit the idea of using TinaCMS for our site.
Like forestry, TinaCMS is git-based, open-source, and self-hostable. Unlike forestry, the editing experience is real-time and the UI is way more intuitive for content editors. There is a free forever tier that allows for two users, or we can self host it, though the self-hosted version lacks a few useful features.
Our website was built with a CMS in mind, and editing the site without one is not ideal for content editor. The structure is not intuitive, and all of the documentation for the site is in yaml directories that are not easy to navigate. TinaCMS would allow us to keep the benefits of a static, git-based site while also providing a much better editing experience.