THE PRACTICAL GUIDE TO CONTENT-ADDRESSED PUBLISHING12 topics · 10 field guides

IPFS Website CMS / EDITORIAL WORKFLOWS

Edit privately. Publish complete pages.

A CMS can power the editorial side while readers receive a lightweight static website. Keep the boundary between private work and public artifacts explicit.

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Choose the authoring model

A Git-based CMS, a hosted headless CMS, or a conventional CMS with a static export can support different publishing needs. Evaluate draft review, images, permissions, localization, and export before choosing a model. The important question is how approved content becomes a complete public artifact, not whether a product name includes decentralized or headless.

Model content for people and pages

Define the title, slug, excerpt, body, images, alt text, dates, categories, and related topics your editors need. Validate required fields before generating the website. Give editors understandable errors rather than an unexplained failed deployment. Keep taxonomies purposeful: a category should organize a real subject, and a tag archive should help a reader find relevant material.

Keep sensitive material on the authoring side

Draft content, CMS access tokens, private previews, and administrator details do not belong in the deployed folder. A difficult-to-guess content address is not access control. Review the actual static output for leaks before publication. Removing a link or switching a public pointer later cannot guarantee the disappearance of previously distributed copies.

Make publication a controlled transition

Separate saved, approved, built, retained, and publicly available states. A CMS save event should not silently imply that the final release has passed testing. Record the revision that produced each root CID and the person or process that approved publication. Test media, archives, metadata, and feeds together before changing the public entry point.

Technical reference: Decap CMS architecture overview. Review the relevant configuration before applying it to a production environment.

COMMON QUESTIONS

IPFS Website CMS: the details

Does the CMS itself run on IPFS?

Not in this architecture. The CMS handles authoring and access control separately; IPFS distributes the approved static output.

Can a browser fetch CMS content at runtime?

It can when the chosen API permits it, but that creates an ongoing dependency on the CMS service. Describe that dependency rather than claiming a fully self-contained release.

FIELD GUIDES

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