Notion as a CMS

In my planning for April - one of my goals was to use Notion as a CMS for this blog.

I chose Notion because it is an integral part of my daily workflow, both for my personal work and day job. (I have a project in the works that will convert my daily notes from obsidian.md to Notion.)

Before doing anything, I'd like to write up 2 things:

• Alternatives (none of which I am going to use, because I want to scratch an itch, but it is still useful to take a look at what exists).
• Use cases and constraints for the tool.

Alternatives #

This blog is built with 11ty.

Alternative 1: The current approach #

The current "CMS" I use is the following:

• Write drafts in Notion.
• Edit in Notion.
• Export as Markdown.
• Push to a private repository.
• A build trigger on Netlify is tripped which kicks off a redeployment and updates this blog.

Alternative 2: Strapi #

A quick google search for "11ty CMS" returns Strapi.io.
Strapi seems to be a headless CMS that you can couple with a number of integrations to get "out of the box" support for a fairly robust CMS.

Strapi is open source and has the option to self-host. This seems reasonable and probably a strong contender for a solution.
However, it does add a layer of complexity and lives outside my current tooling. It does also sound like too much for the use case I have.

Admittedly, this is where I stopped my alternative research.

Use Cases & Constraints #

I have a few use cases and features that I want to support with this build:

• I want to write articles in Notion.
• I want to publish articles through Notion when I am ready through a single click.
• I want to unpublish articles at will, with a single click.
• I want to revise articles that are already live.
• I want to synchronize any existing articles on sequential.dev into Notion.
• I want an opinionated format and database structure on Notion. (TBD)

Additionally, there are a few technical/nice-to-have requirements I want to have:

• The CMS tool should update a private GH repository with changes made on Notion.
• The CMS tool should offer 2-way synchronization, that is, a change on Notion is reflected in the repository, and a change in the repository, is reflected on Notion.
• The CMS tool should maintain a write-only log on all changes, this log should be accessible in Notion.
• The CMS tool should support saving drafts to both Notion and the Git repository.
• The CMS tool should support images.
• The CMS tool should be hosted and accessible through cms.sequential.dev and have it be protected by authentication.
• cms.sequential.dev/new should redirect to a blank Notion page for a new draft.
• Should catastrophe befall both Notion and Github, I should be able to restore the entirety of my CMS and blog with a single command.
• Ideally, I'd like to have a Google Chrome plugin that allows the one click publishing, if not, cms.sequential.dev can house that functionality.

That is all for now!

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