briefly looked at it, they support html as pageContent, so it should work
looks like a nice alternative too
haven't seen it before, looks really awesome
@John Siciliano do you like it? should we make a video about it?
Yeah, I think it's a tool that non-techie clients can get their head around too ... so could be useful as a CMS option. They are one of Notion's biggest competitors, not that that means they are anywhere as popular as Notion, but they have a good product.
seems they are huge as well, no idea how I missed them
Thanks for sharing this.
There are positive qualities about it for a CMS.
- It has a "canvas" column type in databases that lets you write a blog using all the components (plus slash command to access them)
- API lets you use your custom names for columns or machine names which is preferred because then you don't risk changing a column name and the bindings breaking.
Some negative things make it challenging
- The canvas content doesnt all get delivered in the API. My images were missing for example.. Even if you didn't want to use images, it's served as markdown
- I found a plugin called
toHtml which converts canvas or any other field to html content and this does serve images (also random inline css which i dont like). I'm not totally fond of this solution because idk how dependable it is... like if something structurally changing in Coda maybe itll affect the HTML, idk. Also the plugin hasnt been updated in over two years, another red flag.
- A regular image column gets served as just the filename. In order to get the full image URL you have to request all the content to be delivered in
rich format which adds three backticks to the start and end of content. Can't find how to remove this because it happens at the API call, not in the Coda UI. I suppose we could use toHtml function again here, but the workaround are stacking up IMO
- During conversion to html, alt text isnt preserved
Uhh, thanks for investigating, maybe should start making issues for things like this to keep track of what we know
Missing images is kinda a deal breaker
Thanks for looking into this, @John Siciliano — I understand the reluctance in relying on a third-party plugin. Looking at ToHtml, it says "The HTML contents are generated natively by Coda, and this pack makes no modification to it, it just passes the value onwards as is." Maybe that's why it hasn't needed to be updated, because it's just copying Coda's native HTML output (as in, if Coda changes how they render their HTML, it will still work)?
@Spaceman do you confirm images are not present in the API output?
I haven't done any testing, sorry, @Oleg Isonen
John said images are not present in the API, if that's correct then this API is of no use
not for publishing at least, maybe some kind of integrations for code, but in that case you can't just publish content over api
Images show up if you request rich content but that means all fields are delivered with three backticks
ah ok, so with a custom logic, it can at least potentially made to work.
What was the final consensus on this?
At this point in time it would only be good for a database that doesnt contain images or canvas. You'd have to run the data through something like n8n or Workers (advanced) if you really wanted to use Coda and those platforms can correct the issues. Here's the github issue
https://github.com/webstudio-is/webstudio/issues/3708Would be great to point this out to them and see how they respond
If I understand correctly, even if someone would create a custom backend to work around api issues, but when actual part of content is not available over api like images, the api becomes completely unusable for publishin
yeah but if you use toHtml plugin it does render the missing content
I wonder how that can be ...
