I am a Hugo user since 2020 based on GitHub and I kept it building several blogs - but whereas for each of these blog I write seldom so that it doesn’t bother me to write straight from my IDE and Committing from it - for another one I’m increasingly feeling the need to write on-the-go (as it is a travel blog indeed!).
At that time (2020) Netlify was not what I needed but, having a look, it looks like it isn’t updated anymore to new versions.
I haven’t tried Forestry.io yet but before I’d doI would ask to hear your opinion according to which one would fit better for me.
I have a range of custom shortcodes (sometimes I even forget which ones and which with options) - so it should allow me to have custom shortcuts.
Images are located into the post’s folder (not in static - as it is expected by Netlify).
How would you approach my needs in order to step up with a blog?
I’m assuming you’re referring to NetlifyCMS vs Forestry - both of which are GUI editors. So you don’t have to directly edit markdown files and can do it via an interface. They both do similar things and can hook to Github/Gitlab to commit the new files or posts.
Answering specifically your questions:
For a list of custom shortcodes, it can done via the snippets features in Forestry. Snippets | Forestry.io
For Images in posts folder. Not sure why you would want to do that, and I believe that Hugo enforces the use of the static folder not Forestry. But Forestly does allow custom folders to store images if you want.
I’ve been using using Forestry for the past 2-3 years and works great for a simple blog.
FWIW the creators of Forestry have moved on to TinaCMS, and will be shutting down Forestry at some point, so I recommend going with TinaCMS now for new CMS projects instead of migrating later.
Have a number of customers that are using Forestry.io since some years. They seem happy with it and as a developer I like it as well, easy to integrate without locking you in.
As @lkhrs mention they have moved on to https://tina.io and Forestry will be closed by next year if my information is correct. Tina.io only supports NextJS for now but I believe they plan to support a number of systems including Hugo.
Forestry.io is great. Even though it will eventually be ended, they wont terminate it until they have a Tina.io solution for Hugo based sites to migrate over to.
I do like being able to put images in with a post folder from Hugo. However, leaving that convention for Forestry.io’s integration with Cloudinary is MUCH better. For one, it allows you to get remove that image weight from your repo. Two, Cloudinary offers image management as well as “on-the-fly-image-optimization” which they call “transformations.” So, leveraging Forestry and Cloudinary will make your Repo smaller and on the frontend, you site will load faster if you apply image transformations.
As mentioned above Cloudcannon is working hard to integrate with Hugo. I still think that Forestry and Tina give you best options at the moment. Good luck!