Some time has passed since migrating my office site to Directus

The Kansock Industries site has not changed visually, but recently I migrated its content management to Directus.

Directus is a product in the category commonly called a headless CMS. A headless CMS can output various content created in its admin screen as JSON. A common usage pattern is for the frontend to fetch and display content through an API.

However, the current Kansock Industries site only has pages for About KANSOCK.INDUSTRIES and Contact.

Why bother introducing a headless CMS for a site of this scale? The main reason is that the old site had quite a few articles, and I want to migrate them from the old site.

Those old articles were written in Markdown, so I was looking for a headless CMS that could handle Markdown. I tried quite a few different types of CMS.

There is another reason I introduced a headless CMS like Directus. I wanted to add dynamic features such as a contact form. At the moment, the form is very ordinary, but going forward I would like to use it partly as a Directus feature test and make a slightly more elaborate form.

Contentful was good

Currently, the A Broader Frontend site uses Contentful as its CMS. The Contentful editing environment is comfortable enough that I could happily keep using it forever. However, if the content keeps increasing, there is a possibility that someday it will move into a paid plan. I do not think that will happen anytime soon, but the thought started to bother me. At first I was fine with paying if necessary, but feelings change.

For a site using Contentful, it is possible to reduce monthly usage by reducing API access during builds. But when I compared the effort required for that with the appeal of always being able to hold the content myself, I concluded that the self-hosted type I wanted was Directus.

Directus also has a paid plan called Directus Cloud, so if necessary there is a path to move there. It is also considerably cheaper than Contentful. That makes it quite attractive.

Current CMS momentum is strong on the SaaS side. At the same time, in terms of install-based systems, PHP-based CMSs still seem mainstream even in 2024. I myself worked with WordPress until around 2010, but after various thoughts I moved to JVM- and Node.js-based systems and have continued from there. PHP-based systems should be handled by people who are good at them, and my stance is that I can be useful in situations where something like Directus is needed.

When something needs to be built, I still want to be useful in the areas where I am strong.