Forestry CMS is Perfect For Your Static Site

Combining Gatsby with Forestry CMS will make updating your blog, company website, or even larger projects a painless experience. It's easy to set-up, easy to update as your needs change over time, and easy to use.

Do you need to be technical?

No, using forestry is just as easy as updating your social media. You sign in, make your changes, preview them, and click save. That's it, your website will show the changes in a few minutes.

You will most likely need a developer to help you set it up. Forestry works with git, a tool developers use regularly and static-sites. Both of those can be pretty tricky for non-technical folks to set up. But once a good developer has your forestry site wired together, making changes and creating new content is a breeze for anyone.

What types of content can you work with?

Images and anything with text. This is where Forestry shines. Have a look at our website. You'll see it's mostly made up of heading text, paragraphs, lists, and images. All of those are extremely easy to add to forestry and to edit. You want to change that big paragraph into an easy to read bulleted list, no problem just make the change in forestry. In the background, it will save all of your data as markdown.

Forestry saves your content as markdown

This is important because markdown has two parts. 1. Frontmatter and 2. body. And we have the ability to edit both easily in Forestry. In the image, you can see the first white column has all of our front matter fields (Title, Author, Date, Hero Image) and the second column contains the body.

In the frontmatter section, each input is controlled. For example, we can only select from a list of authors or pick a certain date. You can change those controls easily in the front matter settings menu on the sidebar. Forestry lets you create templates that are easy to edit.

In the body section you can type anything that markdown supports (headings, paragraphs, lists, images, links, code blocks, and pull-quotes). It feels like typing in a simplified word processor.

Working with images is really easy too.

You can upload images through the CMS and insert those images into your long content or even change out the images in the front matter. To upload the previous screenshot, I simply selected "insert image", found the screenshot on my desktop, and clicked upload. I changed the alt text and title and was ready to go in a few seconds (Our set-up uses gatsby image to process the image during the website build stage for speed and SEO, but that's a more technical topic for another post).

I want to add a new content type to my site

Let's say you have a standard lawyer website with a blog. One day you decide you want to add a FAQ section to your site. You want to be able to update the questions and answers easily in Forestry. You are going to need a developer to set this up. Unlike more robust CMS's like Wordpress, or Contentful, a change like that has to be configured in the Forestry template and then in the static site. But once it's set up, it's a breeze to make those changes.

You don't need a developer to help you every time you want to add new content

We have a client that is a therapist. She wanted to create pages for common problems that her patients face like, depression, anxiety, etc. So we set up a collection. This allows her to make a new page for any problem without reaching out to a developer. When she wants to create a new page she simply clicks the "new" button and then a blank page pops up. The fields that she has to fill out are determined by a template in forestry that is editable.

Once again you'll see we need some front matter details (like title, subtitle, and hero image) and the body of the page. Our client has a lot of flexibility to write whatever she wants in the body.

Is it fast?

Yes, it's very fast! And your site will be too. We probably don't have to tell you again but static sites are the fastest sites around and making changes in Forestry is very fast. If you've ever used something like WordPress you might have experienced loading if you tried to edit your site during heavy traffic. Unlike WordPress, Forestry is not hosted on the same servers as your website. It's a completely independent website that simply saves your changes to the place you've decided to save your website's code (usually Github or some other repository provider). Once those changes are saved your website gets rebuilt and new static files are sent out to the world featuring your changes.

When working with Forestry there are almost never any loading screens or waiting for files to upload.

With live preview, editing your site in real-time is easy

Forestry allows you to set up a live preview of your changes. We use Gatsby and setting this up was very easy. Now the user can type in changes, such as changing the title of a page, click on the preview icon, and instantly see those changes on a preview of their site. Then to publish those changes all you have to do is click "save"

There are limitations to live preview

• It takes a few minutes to start once you first visit
• Some changes just don't show up (you have to restart the preview in the settings menu)
• We've experienced it being down a few times, closing the tab, waiting ten minutes, and refreshing all worked for us.

You can easily change to other CMS's or frontends

At the end of the day, Forestry is saving markdown files in the same folders as your website's code. And several different CMS can read and edit those markdown files. Because of that, you are not stuck with Forestry. If your company gets larger or your needs change you can switch out Forestry for another CMS at any time.

You could also use two CMS's at the same time.

Let's say you wanted to edit your website's blog and have products for sale on your website. You could manage the content of your blog with Forestry. And use something like Shopify to manage your products. With Gatsby it's easy to combine multiple data sources.

The downsides to Forestry

If you want a clean, easy to use, easy to update, CMS for your static site than Forestry might be a great option for you. They have a generous free-tier and paid plans start at $30/month.