Okay so I swear to the skies this isn’t supposed to be a static site content management system app review blog, but, BUT: I think you have to check out Mattrbld, which has very quickly become my new favorite blog editor.
Full disclosure: I’m still pretty new to it, and it’s still a pretty new app itself, having just gone 1.0 recently, but there’s a lot to love here.
I’ve been…not enthusiastic about Decap, the cms/editor I’ve been using, for a bit now, mostly because it’s just kind of ugly. The UI just doesn’t feel great, it’s not terribly mobile friendly, and I just don’t love it, you know? It’s not something that makes me want to pop open a window and start blogging about stuff, at a time when I’m actively interested in blogging more. It works, it gets the job done! And there’s still plenty to appreciate about it, I think. But I’ve been wondering out loud recently if maybe there wasn’t a better way.
And then I swear like a week later I learned about Mattrbld, and once I took it for a spin and saw what it was doing, I became rather enamored.
So the shtick here is that instead of directly “installing” it to your repo, like you do with Decap, you run Mattrbld through a dedicated instance that runs as a PWA in your browser. You connect it up to your repo (or repos, more on that shortly), and from there you can do all your config directly within the app itself. It stores all your settings, including schemas and collection configurations, in a dedicated dot-folder in your repo; it can even collect schema info directly from existing content, which feels kind of disturbingly magical, to be honest.
The cool thing, or one of the cool things, here, is you can connect your PWA usage of Mattrbld to multiple repos, each with their own separate configs—so now I have my three blogs all set up within it, which means I can do all my blogging from a single platform. And then because all the repo-specific info is stored in that dot folder in each repo, you can load it up on multiple devices pretty easily.
And, what’s maybe most important here, is the interface feels nice. I am having more fun typing up blog posts here than I was in Decap (or even in Obsidian, knowing I’d eventually have to copy-paste it all into Decap to do it). There’s a reduction of friction here that makes the whole experience feel more like a classic CMS set-up than I’ve experienced yet, for my limited needs.
One of the more interesting gotchas that’s worth noting is that you’re technically working with content in your browser, in your local storage, which is then sync’ed up on demand with the remote repo. It’s maybe the one mental hurdle I’m still working on leaping here, not that it’s a particularly challenging one; mostly affects how I work with drafts, knowing both I need to figure out how to go tell Netlify to ignore my drafts-only syncs so I’m not running needless builds, and also reminding myself I do need to hit that sync button if I want to type up a draft on my computer and publish it later on my phone.
There’s more I should say or could say here, stuff I’m still taking note of and trying to work out for myself, but right now I’m mostly just excited to just go ahead and hit publish on this post and let it fly. Because I just…wrote it in Mattrbld. And now I can just…publish it. It’s almost…fun!…to blog!…