Welcome to Chisel - our API-first CMS built on top of Parse Server, now in BETA.
It was back in October 2015 when I first wrote about how I saw the future workflow of building content-driven static sites. Beach offered nearly all the pieces of that particular puzzle. Except the CMS part, where we have been using Contentful, Prismic and Cockpit among others.
When Parse.com shut down and having jumped into Parse Server, the open source alternative, along with Parse Dashboard, it clicked that this would make for a great stack for a headless CMS.
At one end of the spectrum, it's fully open and flexible - I can tweak, change, extend and customise every aspect of the backend, a node.js / express.js application with mongoDB. It provides an API out of the box for my resources, and a plentiful number of client libraries and SDKs.
The Parse Dashboard, which provides a web interface to the core data and settings makes working with Parse server a breeze.
I can run Parse Server and Parse Dashboard locally, I can host it easily myself using AWS, Digital Ocean etc. or use one of a number of Parse Server hosting specialists.
But, Parse Server alone did not provide me with a content management solution, it was a backend solution.
So, late in 2016 I started to build out a proof of concept CMS app, with the team here at Beach and by late 2016 we had some progress. But a number of other priorities has meant that Chisel development has had a bit of a stop-start progress during 2017.
It's actually been working well for a while and we've been using it internally, but not had chance to make a fuss about it. But I'm not one for leaving work in progress, so I'm very happy formally announce Chisel by way of a shiny new product site - https://chiselcms.com.
Currently, we're leading off with the self-help, self-host or run locally options, which is more suited to the developer community (though it's really quite easy to get started if you're not an experienced javascript coder) . You can run Chisel from the open source Github repositories. Even more straightforward, you can run it from npm. You can run it locally or you can host it on your servers or a managed service provider. There's loads of options, because developers like options - there's no blackboxes here.
However, that's not the end of the road by any stretch of the imagination.
We've already made an initial integration into our static site generator app, Hammer. This way, you can build content managed static sites with ease.
We've already built support for managed Parse Server and Chisel Hosting via Forge, setting up everything with a couple of clicks, we'll be releasing this soon.
There's so much to talk about with Chisel, it truly is a powerful, flexible and open solution to creating and managing your content across different platforms and devices. We're just getting started.
If you're interested in the development history of Chisel, take a look at this Topic on our community site, and of course, join the discussion.
If you'd like to setup Chisel with Parse Server, hosted on a free heroku server, this is a helpful step-by-step guide.
And finally, did I mention Chisel, just like Parse Server, is open-source. We're chipping away at the roadmap, but if there's something you'd like to see, something urgent to improve or something we've missed, then let us know on the community site and better yet, I'm happy to review your pull requests.