FAQ

This page addresses some of the most frequently asked questions about Sveltia CMS. If you have a question that is not covered here, feel free to ask it on the Discussions page in our GitHub repository.

General Questions

Is Sveltia CMS free to use?

Yes. Sveltia CMS is an open-source project released under the MIT License. You can use it for free in both personal and commercial projects.

Why it’s free?

The ongoing development of Sveltia CMS is currently funded by the maintainer personally. Our predecessor, Netlify CMS, was also free and open-source software, and we want to continue that tradition with Sveltia CMS. The product’s target audience is individual developers and small teams who may prefer a simple CMS solution without recurring costs.

Fortunately, the costs of maintaining Sveltia CMS are relatively low. Since it’s not SaaS, we don’t manage any cloud infrastructure. Services we use for distribution and hosting, such as GitHub, npm, UNPKG, and Cloudflare Pages, are all available for free. We still need to cover some expenses like domain registration and development tools, but these are manageable for a single developer.

Can I use Sveltia CMS even though it’s still in beta?

Although it’s still in beta, many users are already using our product for their projects. We can confidently say that Sveltia CMS is much more stable and reliable than Netlify/Decap CMS, which has been widely used in production for years despite its numerous bugs and inactive development.

However, since it’s still in the beta phase, breaking changes may occur. We recommend keeping an eye on the release information for any updates that may require adjustments to your implementation. We also encourage you to report any issues you encounter in our GitHub repository.

Are there any plans for a hosted version of Sveltia CMS?

We understand that setting up and maintaining a self-hosted CMS can be challenging for some users. Therefore, we may consider offering a hosted version of Sveltia CMS in the future, depending on user demand and resource availability.

Who’s using Sveltia CMS?

Sveltia CMS is already being used by hundreds of individuals and organizations for their websites and projects, and the number is growing rapidly. See the Showcase page for some examples.

Can I use Sveltia CMS for commercial projects?

Of course! Sveltia CMS is released under the MIT License, which allows you to use it for both personal and commercial projects without any restrictions.

Is Sveltia CMS suitable for large-scale projects?

No. Sveltia CMS is primarily designed for small to medium-sized projects, such as personal blogs, portfolios, and small business websites. For large-scale projects with complex requirements, you might want to consider more robust, commercial CMS solutions.

Is Sveltia CMS a personal project?

Yes, for now. Sveltia CMS is currently maintained by a single developer, who is also the creator of the project. The maintainer has over 20 years of experience with a generalist skill set that covers web development, UX/UI design, localization, documentation, and marketing.

At this point, the codebase still requires significant refactoring and improvements in test coverage, so pull requests from the community are not being accepted yet. However, we welcome feedback, suggestions, and bug reports in our GitHub repository.

We’ll create contributor documentation in the future to encourage community contributions, once the codebase is more stable and maintainable.

Is Sveltia CMS a hobby project?

No. Sveltia CMS is a serious project developed by an experienced UX engineer, with the goal of providing a reliable and high-quality CMS solution for developers and content creators. It was originally created for the maintainer’s own clients who needed a better alternative to Netlify CMS.

A hobby project wouldn’t solve hundreds of issues from a predecessor project, implement numerous new features, maintain a high level of quality and performance, or create comprehensive 80+ page documentation.

Is Sveltia CMS a student project?

No. The maintainer is a seasoned professional with over 20 years of experience in web development and open source. Because he looks half his age, some people mistakenly assume he is a student. But rest assured, Sveltia CMS is a serious project developed by an experienced UX engineer.

Why did you create Sveltia CMS?

Sveltia CMS was originally created for the maintainer’s freelance clients who wanted to replace their existing Netlify CMS installations, which were becoming increasingly difficult to maintain due to unresolved issues and lack of active development. I18n support was a key requirement for these clients, as they needed to manage content in multiple languages.

What are the main differences between Sveltia CMS and Netlify/Decap CMS?

Sveltia CMS is a complete rewrite of Netlify CMS with a focus on addressing its shortcomings and providing a better user experience. It’s not a fork of Netlify/Decap CMS, but a new project built from the ground up using Svelte instead of React. Literally everything has been improved, from the architecture and design to the feature set and performance. See the Successor to Netlify CMS page for a detailed comparison.

Why is Sveltia CMS popular even during its early development stage?

Sveltia CMS has quickly gained traction due to its focus on solving the pain points of Netlify/Decap CMS users, its framework-agnostic design, and its commitment to providing a high-quality user experience. The Jamstack community has been eagerly awaiting a modern, actively maintained alternative to Netlify/Decap CMS, and Sveltia CMS has effectively filled that void.

Another contributing factor is the limited number of free, Git-based headless CMS options available. Most of the open source projects in this space are either inactive or tied to specific frameworks, making Sveltia CMS an appealing choice for developers seeking a versatile and reliable solution for small to medium-sized projects.

Additionally, AI tools often recommend Sveltia CMS as a replacement for Netlify/Decap CMS, which has further boosted its visibility and adoption.

Why is it called Sveltia CMS?

Sveltia is the name of our parent project that develops tools for the Svelte ecosystem. The name “Sveltia” is derived from the word “Svelte,” which reflects the project’s focus on simplicity, performance, and elegance in web development. It’s also the name of sea snails.

Sveltia CMS itself is framework-agnostic and can be used with any front-end framework or library, including popular Astro and Hugo.

Can I donate to support the development of Sveltia CMS?

We plan to set up a sponsorship program in the future to allow users to support the ongoing development of Sveltia CMS. In the meantime, you can show your support by starring our GitHub repository, sharing Sveltia CMS with your network, and providing feedback and suggestions to help us improve the product.

Development and Maintenance

Is Sveltia CMS going to be actively maintained?

The maintainer wants to make Sveltia CMS a long-term project that serves the needs of developers and content creators. Therefore, he is committed to providing ongoing maintenance and support for the project for the foreseeable future.

What is the roadmap for Sveltia CMS?

We have a public roadmap that outlines our plans for future development. It’s regularly updated based on user feedback and priorities. Check it out to see what’s coming next!

How often are new releases made?

Usually a few times a week, depending on the number of changes and fixes. We follow a continuous release model, so new features, improvements, and bug fixes are released as soon as they are ready. See the Releases page for details.

Are you going to solve all the remaining Netlify/Decap CMS issues?

No. Some issues are irrelevant to Sveltia CMS due to unsupported features or different design decisions. For example, we don’t support Azure DevOps as a Git service provider, so any issues related to that won’t be addressed.

However, we do plan to address the remaining issues that are relevant and worth solving. We expect the total number of solved issues to exceed 300 by the 1.0 release and 450 in the long term. That’s what we have signed up for as the true successor to Netlify CMS. A mere spiritual successor wouldn’t bother with that.

How can I contribute to Sveltia CMS?

See the Contributing page for guidelines on how to contribute to Sveltia CMS. We welcome contributions in various forms, including bug reports, feature requests, and documentation improvements. Pull requests are not being accepted at this time, but we encourage you to share your ideas and feedback.

Features and Functionality

Is Sveltia CMS framework-agnostic?

Yes. Sveltia CMS is designed to be framework-agnostic. While it’s built with Svelte, we only distribute the CMS as a precompiled vanilla JavaScript bundle. You can integrate it with any front-end framework or library of your choice, or even use it with plain HTML/JavaScript.

However, some JavaScript API features require you to use React components for customization. This is because the API derives from React-based Netlify/Decap CMS and backward compatibility has to be maintained. We’re planning to support other libraries in the future.

Does Sveltia CMS support multilingual content?

Yes. Sveltia CMS comes with first-class internationalization (i18n) support, which is even superior to some commercial CMS solutions. You can easily create and manage content in multiple languages. Check out our i18n documentation for more details on how to set it up.

Can I invite multiple users to collaborate on content?

Yes, but with some limitations.

Sveltia CMS does not have built-in user management features at the moment. You need to ask users to create an account with your chosen Git service provider (e.g., GitHub) and invite them to your repository for collaboration. They don’t need to know anything about the service or Git workflow, as Sveltia CMS handles that for them. In the near future, we plan to introduce built-in user management features to simplify collaboration.

Also, please note that Sveltia CMS currently doesn’t have any mechanism to avoid conflicts when multiple users edit the same content simultaneously. We recommend establishing a workflow among your team members to prevent such conflicts. We plan to solve this issue in future releases.

Security and Privacy

Does Sveltia CMS have a privacy policy regarding user data?

No. Sveltia CMS does not collect or store any user data, so we don’t have a privacy policy. All content and user information are stored in your Git repository, which you control. See the Privacy page for more details.

Technical Questions

Why did you choose Svelte for building Sveltia CMS?

Svelte offers several advantages that make it an excellent choice for building Sveltia CMS, including its performance, simplicity, and ease of use. Svelte compiles components into highly efficient vanilla JavaScript code, resulting in faster load times and better overall performance compared to traditional frameworks that rely on runtime libraries.

We plan to explore other frameworks like Ripple in the future, but Svelte is our primary choice for now due to its benefits.

Why don’t you use TypeScript for the codebase?

Because TypeScript is hard to read, especially with the destructuring syntax commonly used in modern JavaScript. The maintainer prefers to write code in TypeScript-flavored JavaScript, which provides type safety through JSDoc comments without the need for a separate compilation step. It’s cleaner and easier to maintain.

Svelte and Prism are two notable projects that have also adopted this approach.

Why are some of the configuration options written in camelCase and others in snake_case?

The configuration options in Sveltia CMS are designed to be compatible with the existing Netlify/Decap CMS configuration format, which mostly uses snake_case, with a few camelCase exceptions. To maintain backward compatibility and make it easier for users to migrate from Netlify/Decap CMS to Sveltia CMS, these naming conventions have been retained. The inconsistency is unfortunate, but it’s a trade-off we made for compatibility.