Thoughts on page generation for a 'shop'

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Hello folks.

I’m just about to start building a shop-like website (it’s actually a car garage). I was pondering generating each ‘car’ in a ‘showroom’ list via a content adapter parsing a YAML (more on that reasoning in a moment) data source. However, I saw another topic where somebody used page metadata to do something similar.

The challenge I have is keeping it relatively simple, as it’ll be none technical people updating the content (hence using JSON is none starter). Each car will have data points like price, year, engine, gearbox, etc and a freeform ‘description’. I can imagine fitting this structure into a page, with the data points being metadata (params) and the description just being the content in a markdown file. If I made each car a page bundle too, it’ll be nice to keep car images together with the markdown.

But adding new cars might be hard for the none technical people to deal with. I was going to look into some of the GUI ‘CMS’ type overlays as a way to address this technical detail.

I then ponder just doing it all via a YAML file and content adapter, where it might be relatively easy for the none technical people to add text, and simply upload images to one directory (with, perhaps, image files ‘keyed’ by car registration mark).

What I’m really asking then is, what are folks’ experience of keeping things simple for a site like this, and would you veer towards page bundles or content adapters?

Any experience and thoughts you may have will be most welcomed :slight_smile:

Many thanks!

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I hear “non-technical people” and I think a simple form based CMS on top of the site would probably do the trick. Depending on the amount of time you can invest to look into that, it could be a simple script up to an online service that takes care of authentication and database… it’s an extra maintenance step though, and you also have the question of future availability. Those services and tools typically live on top of your Git repo, and you define an action or workflow that deploys the changes they committed. I go to this website when I need to find inspiration.

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Good heads up on Jamstack, thank you.

Any thoughts on data - params vs content adapters? :slight_smile:

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I am for portability. There are plenty of SSGs out there that transform Markdown with YAML front matter just fine. I see content adapters useful only if you have to “adapt” to what is given to you. So if your customer pays for a system that does the storage, sales, CRM, tasks, etc. then that system might have an export function. If that function exports something usefule (XML or JSON) then that is the content you could adapt. In that case it’s worth looking into. In the end, you need to adapt once. Either when generating the site (content adapters) or when generating the content (CMS).

And without going too much into details, sometimes it’s best if the customer doesn’t need to change or learn anything. Another plus for content adapters :wink: