Creativity Leadership CMS Google Cloud Datastore
Using Google Datastore for Content Management
Posted by
Jonathan Fries on .
I have a small site I am building with my kids. It's a simple site based around a story that we've been working on together. I'll provide a link to it, though it is not professional looking, polished, or completely working.
The point of bringing it up is two-fold -
- It's the next step I'm taking related to the creative exercise I mentioned last week.
- I'm using Google Cloud Datastore for some basic content management.
For number 1 the basic idea is to show them things like you can own a domain name and you can create HTML pages and here is a way to do something more with those creative ideas than just write them down. It's a little bit interactive.
For number 2 I've been leveraging Google Datastore (a really simple data storage mechanism from Google) to store small blurbs of text, references to images, and a little bit of HTML. The site can then pull this stored content with some basic API calls.
It's a nice way to get some simple content management for a very inexpensive price (free!), which I could see using on a single page site, basic site, or even integrated with a simple application.
It does not have as nice of features as Contentful, but it's a bit simpler and faster. Features that it lacks are: previewing HTML, management of unpublished content, and nice integration with uploaded media. So you wouldn't want to hand a back-end like this to (most) marketing departments, but for a technical person or someone willing to learn it is fine.
What I'm building is a fast, bare-bones kind of a thing, so I don't care if I have any of the nice content management stuff. The site is Chuckles The Dirt-Chip Muffin. It's probably more violent than what is appropriate for a 7 year-old and a 9 year-old, but it was their idea and we are enjoying working on it together.