Tina CMS: a retrospective
I decided to try TinaCMS (aka Tina). It’s another headless CMS that supports Git. Perfect for my workflow! It has built in media management, it can validate metadata fields on a post, and it can push directly to your Git repo. Unfortunately, it didn’t fit with my flow, as much as I wanted it to. Here are the challenges I faced, and why I ultimately decided not to use Tina.
Separate content repo woes
This blog consists of two repos; a website repo, and a content repo. The content repo is a flat folder with all my blog posts in Markdown. Luckily, TinaCMS works with a separate content repo. When you set up Tina, you add a tina folder that contains configuration for Tina cloud to read. This configuration is where you specify the metadata of your blog posts, the path to your content, among a few other settings.
Something that the docs don’t mention is the requirement to have a tina folder in both the website repo, and the content repo. When you run tinacms build it will generate some files in your tina folder in the content repo. Unfortunately, this folder does not play nicely with AstroJS if you’re using content collections. Including this folder caused the following error:
I was able to get around this issue by removing the folder during my Netlify build step. But it was major pain point. With a hacky solution.
Failing build on deploy previews
I didn’t realise at the time, but out of the box, Tina doesn’t support multiple branches. It comes as a feature for the paid editorial workflow. It wasn’t a dealbreaker, but it was an inconvenience. Anytime I wanted to push a new feature, I couldn’t test it out in a deploy preview. I would have to test in production.
Flat file structure issues
After the separate content repo woes, and failed deploy previews, I was finally able to get Tina up and running. I could see, and edit my posts! But then I faced another blocker. I couldn’t create posts. Whenever I pressed save, I would get the following error:
The reason was because I set my path in Tina config to an empty string. I needed to set it as an empty string, so I could display my posts in the flat folder. However, Tina will add a / when saving a post, which will cause the call to GitHub to fail.
This blocker was the final nail in the coffin. I opened an issue for it.. I’m hoping they’ll accept my suggestion, or come up with a better approach in the future!
Deciding not to use TinaCMS
The culmination of all the issues above, made me realise that Tina wasn’t for me. I really wanted to get TinaCMS to work. I had a few back and forth’s on Tina Discord in an attempt to resolve my issues. But last week, I decided to not continue with it. I doubled down on Obsidian as I started writing more. And I found the Obsidian Cloudinary plugin, which solved my media management problems. I had many learnings during this process. And I’m pretty confident saying, if you have an AstroJS site with a separate content repo, TinaCMS might not be for you.