Introduction

Outstatic is an open source content management system (CMS) for static websites using Next.js.

The concept is simple: write content, click save, and see the changes on your website.

Requirements:

You can get started by visiting our Getting started section. If you want to learn a bit more about Outstatic, keep reading.

How does Outstatic work?

We provide you with a user interface to create and edit website content. There is no database or server to set up: all the data is added to your GitHub repository.

To see the changes on your website, you'll need to wait until Vercel finishes deploying it. In the case that you are developing your site locally, you'll need to pull the changes to see them on your dev environment.

Your site's content is organised into two parts: Collections and Documents.

What are Collections?

Collections are used to organise and define the types of content on your website. Think of them as categories. For example, in the case of a blog, you might create a Posts collection to hold your posts. Each post in the collection will be a post document.

Collections form the structure of your website, so you probably won't be creating them often. When you log in to your Outstatic dashboard for the first time, you'll be asked to create a Collection.

Collections are organised as folders in your GitHub repository under the following path:

/outstatic/content/{collection}

What's a Document?

A Document is what you will be creating and editing more frequently. In the case of our example above, a Document would be a blog post.

Documents are saved at: /outstatic/content/{collection}/{document}

Imagine we create a blog post titled: How to raise a dragon - the document would be: /outstatic/content/posts/how-to-raise-a-dragon.md

Documents contains some data by default:

  • Title: the title of the Document.

  • Content: comprising text and images, Content is edited via a simple editor interface.

  • Date: the date the Document was published. This can be edited and will be available on the frontend as the publishedAt variable.

  • Status: Documents can be in either published or draft status. Published Documents are visible on your website.

  • Author: who created the Document. This field is automatically populated with your GitHub name and avatar, but can be edited.

  • URL Slug (optional): this is created automatically based on the Document title, but can be edited.

  • Description (optional): a short description of the Document's contents.

  • Cover Image (optional): an image to be used as a cover or Open Graph image.

But you are not limited to the above, you can also add Custom Fields to your documents.

Next: the Content Editor, which is used to edit Documents.