This looks cool but I moved all my repos to a self-hosted forge when GitHub openly and notoriously refused to stop collaborating with ICE (that runs concentration camps in Texas).
It would be nice to have this support generic/arbitrary git servers. I’ve been feeling this pain point for a while and have been considering building something like this myself.
why this over keystatic or statamic or (insert upcoming decap replacement)?
They all look great, but if you were pressing me for a comment:
- Keystatic: I want it to run online, not as a local app.
- Statamic: I don't want an opinionated, full-stack CMS + SSG. I want to manage content in whatever app/website I'm building whether it's Next.js, Astro, 11ty...
- Decap CMS: I mentioned it in my post, I always found Decap's UI/UX pretty lacking, and the DX wasn't that smooth either.
With that being said, each one of these projects have been around for much longer, I don't necessarily expect to compete (yet).
There is als Sveltia cms, based on Decap's backend but with a redone UI
I saw that but couldn't see an actual demo. I'll have to deploy it and see for myself.
(inset upcoming decap replacement)
What's wrong with DecapCMS?
ask op, or the dozen or so companies making a similar product
This is awesome however, I’m hesitant due to the pro pricing. I get it, but I’m definitely looking for something we can host that can do this for our customer support team who aren’t the best at git, or markdown for that matter, but have valuable knowledge of setup and configuration of our apps.
Any plans to just go full OSS with it and do sponsorships or OSI model foundation support? If this is yet another SaaS product then we’ll have to stick with our current methods.
Very cool stuff though. Keep going! GitHub or GitLab should just buy this for their platform.
I feel your frustration, it should either be free or not-free. Stop pretending to be both, while ending up being neither!
Maybe we can start to refer to these types of projects as GOSS (Gated Open Source Software) or maybe COSS (Crippled Open Source Software)? :-)
you can download the code and self host it. how is that not open source software?
- It's 100% Open Source: https://github.com/pages-cms/pages-cms
- You can self-host it for free on Cloudflare Pages: https://pagescms.org/docs/development/#deploy-on-cloudflare
- The online version is 100% free as well: https://app.pagescms.org
There may be a pro plan at some point for some more complex features. From the FAQ on the front page:
What's the "Pro" plan?
I haven't completely figured it out, but there are a few features I'm working on that I believe would only be relevant to larger teams or professional use. Things like real-time collaboration, advanced media management (e.g., image manipulation), or S3 integration. This not only requires a lot more work but also hosting costs. If you're interested, drop me a line: hunvreus@gmail.com (@hunvreus).> The online version is 100% free
> What's the "Pro" plan? I haven't completely figured it out
Sounds like it's free until it isn't.
This is really cool! I was sad when Forestry went down and this looks better than TinaCMS.
I'm trying to set it up with my Eleventy blog (paavandesign.com/blog) and struggling to get the body field working
Is your repo public? Happy to have a look if it is.
Have you also checked the examples: https://pagescms.org/docs/examples/
edit: this was the bug which I think you're already on top of! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39468906
---
So 'body' is working if I set the type to text but when I set it to rich-text there's no input generated for body
Repo is private (sorry!) but here's the settings YAML file as it stands
content:
- name: blog
label: Blog
type: collection
path: 'src/blog'
view:
fields: [ title, date]
fields:
- name: date
label: Date
type: date
- name: title
label: Title
type: string
- name: description
label: Description
type: string
- name: tags
label: Tags
type: string
- name: body
label: Body
type: rich-textYep, seems to be the same bug as what somebody else reported: if you don't specify a `media` attribute, when the rich-text editor tries to load it fails as it is attempting to load the media related features (to insert images).
Publishing a hotfix in the next hour, in the meantime it should work if you add a media attribute (you can set it as `media: ""` if you don't have an image folder).
I rolled out a hotfix, this should be fixed.
I also found another couple edge cases that are unlikely but that I will patch in the coming days.
Thanks for that.
Very nice! It looks a bit like Publii [0], but the editor part is cloud hosted instead of running as an app on your machine.
I've not tried it yet, it looks pretty slick.
It is quite nice, but since there is no way to configure URLs, it‘s best used for greenfield projects, not moving from some other CMS with a differing URL structure.
What do you mean? Publii allows to configure URLs: https://getpublii.com/blog/publiis-beta-seo-friendly-urls-st...
No. For posts you can only configure whether .html is added.
No way to configure something like https://www.example.com/2024/02/post or anything. Posts always live at the very top of the URL hierarchy, and they always have exactly their title as the last part.
EDIT:
I didn't have a `media` entry in my pages.yml, which meant the rich text editor wasn't loading (JS error was being thrown). When I added that entry, it started working! Brilliant work!
I'm using Jekyll, with yaml frontmatter, and it's not clear how to specify the body. The documentation says that a rich text field could be set up with a "name" option (and gives "body") as an example but my Markdown files don't specify a name for the body.. it's just... there:
https://github.com/colinramsay/colinramsay.github.io/blob/ma...
I'm probably missing something but happy to open an issue if not.
I rolled out a hotfix, this should be fixed. Thanks for the feedback.
Amazing, thank you.
this solved my issue, thanks!
Thanks a lot for finding that bug. I'm adding a hotfix and will release in the next hour.
Tried it out [1], and with a bit of work got it to function. Media, posts, all seem to upload and be viewable. With the lead-in, kind of thought it was going to be "click-a-button, you're done." However, had to wander around a bit figuring out what format zones in the blog example were, and where they needed to be. Also kind of thought it was going to restyle my GitHub page or something, which did not seem to be the case (probably just false expectations)
[1] Uploaded Media using Pages interface: https://github.com/conceptualGabrielPutnam/JAMA4JS/blob/main...
Might be kind of nice if it allowed file upload/delete on folders you have not specifically called out for a function.
On my desktop at least, the user icon is also in the lower left, and then opens the choice window off the screen to the right.
If you can send me screenshots at hunvreus@gmail.com or file an issue on GitHub (https://github.com/pages-cms/pages-cms/issues), I'd love to fix it.
Tried it out [1], and with a bit of work got it to function. Media, posts, all seem to upload and be viewable. With the lead-in, kind of thought it was going to be "click-a-button, you're done." However, had to wander around a bit figuring out what format zones in the blog example were, and where they needed to be. Also kind of thought it was going to restyle my GitHub page or something, which did not seem to be the case (probably just false expectations)
Agreed. For the 1.0.0 release, I want to have a configuration wizard that does most of it for you: select where your files/collections are and it infers the configuration from existing entries.
Hopefully I get it working in the next couple of weeks.
Opened new issue at https://github.com/pages-cms/pages-cms/issues/3 with documentation.
On the second comment, kind of figure it was a WIP currently, hence suggestions. Thanks for the work, as its a fairly light weight way to have a quick little CMS.
I rolled out a hotfix release, let me know if that fixed it.
Issue appears to be fixed, Name now appears in lower left and menu is visible on click with visible choice. Also replied over at the GitHub issue.
https://github.com/conceptualGabrielPutnam/JAMA4JS/blob/main...
It would also be nice if when you're logging in at https://app.pagescms.org/ if you click on your name in the lower left because you're logged in it would show you your GitHub repository options.
Looks very nice.
Any comparisons against other github based CMS?
Personally I've been using Keystatic.
I've not tried it yet, but isn't that running on your local machine? Looks pretty good though.
there is a cloud version for free up to three users that supports multiple simultaneous editors. paid beyond that.
Nice, thanks for the tip. Signing up.
You can also self host with your blog. I have it running as part of my astro deploy on vercel.
Why do I have to give access to all my public and private repos instead of selecting the ones I want to give it access to?
I have an explanation in the FAQ section on the front page:
Why do you need full access to all of my GitHub repositories?
Well, the GitHub API kinda sucks when it comes to OAuth scoping. Pages CMS relies on the OAuth App flow, which doesn't allow for granular permissions. The alternative would be to use the GitHub App flow instead, but:
It's a lot more complicated and would require us to store and orchestrate a lot more in the backend.
Since we need to impersonate users (for things like commits), we anyway need to request user tokens, which technically would give us the same access as with the OAuth App flow.
However, we do not store your GitHub OAuth tokens in the backend. The serverless functions used to facilitate the OAuth login pass the OAuth token to the front-end, allowing it to directly communicate with the GitHub API.
And if you still don't trust the online version, you can deploy your own version for free in less than 10 minutes our Cloudflare Pages.
Do let me know if I got some of this wrong (@hunvreus), and feel free to suggest improvements in the issue queue.
[1] https://github.blog/2022-10-18-introducing-fine-grained-pers...
Got it; I hadn't heard of "Fine-Grained PATs" before so I just ignored it. My personal blog is open source already: https://github.com/FanaHOVA/2024-blog, so I was hoping to just OAuth and try it out, but I understand. Will try the self hosting at some point. Good luck with the project, looks slick.
"Fine-grained pats" is what a herd of cows produces when their feed contains too much fiber.
Check the FAQs at the bottom.
TLDR:
Well, the GitHub API kinda sucks when it comes to OAuth scoping. Pages CMS relies on the OAuth App flow, which doesn't allow for granular permissions.
Supremely cool. So this can supplement e.g. my eleventy sites and provide a way for clients of those sites to easily interact with the content and static asset portions of the site? Seems like there's tons of potential here. Kudos, def will give it a whirl!
Yes it does HOWEVER for now you need to log in with GitHub. I don't think it's too huge of a hassle with most people, but there is a bit of friction.
I am planning to add an "invite by email" feature that will allow you to add users by entering their email address. They can then log in without a GitHub account and use it the same way you do (although the commit will be associated to a Pages CMS GitHub app).
The invite by email feature sounds great, but as you say setting up a github account for a client isn't that much friction. It's not something I'm bothered by at all, but being able to use just an email is definitely supremely more preferable.
Very exciting work.
As I'm quite enthused by the project, I hope you don't mind if I offer some hopefully helpful feedback:
- For the video on your landing page, ideally the youtube would be embedded so it doesn't open another window
- In regards to the video, while I love the content and info, it's not the most marketing friendly. It's over 2 minutes before the background of the video even changes. Ideally the video would get into the demo portion muuuch quicker.
- I clicked on this hackernews link, clicked through to your landing page, scrolled around, but really didn't get a grasp of what it was offering or how it worked or who or what it was for (admittedly I was prly lazy reading). Only after I watched the video, heard you specifically mention eleventy (which I personally use a lot) was my interest piqued enough to actually engage in the content and understand it more. Glad I did, but I gotta feel there's some better way of presenting what you're doing. I quite liked your calling it a wordpress-like CMS over top an existing static site stack.
Those are just the thoughts that came to me. I absolutely love the project, thrilled it's MIT too. Though I'm not really a javascript dev I could definitely see myself using and contributing!
For the video on your landing page, ideally the youtube would be embedded so it doesn't open another window
Yep.
In regards to the video, while I love the content and info, it's not the most marketing friendly. It's over 2 minutes before the background of the video even changes. Ideally the video would get into the demo portion muuuch quicker.
Yep. I also recorded it when I was sick, and my mic is pretty horrid.
I clicked on this hackernews link, clicked through to your landing page, scrolled around, but really didn't get a grasp of what it was offering or how it worked or who or what it was for (admittedly I was prly lazy reading). Only after I watched the video, heard you specifically mention eleventy (which I personally use a lot) was my interest piqued enough to actually engage in the content and understand it more. Glad I did, but I gotta feel there's some better way of presenting what you're doing. I quite liked your calling it a wordpress-like CMS over top an existing static site stack.
I definitely need to level up my marketing game.
Thanks a lot for the input.
This is super cool!
Tried to set it up for our open source Changelog though and getting some errors, it doesn't seem to work with .mdx files
https://github.com/juneHQ/changelog
Anyways this looks super promising
I have a very surface understanding of mdx, but basically it's a mix of markdown and JSX syntax, no? Didn't know you could define some sort of fields like you seem to do with:
import { MdxLayout } from "components/mdx-layout.tsx";
export const meta = {
slug: "all-time-high",
publishedAt: "2022-09-16T10:00:00.000Z",
title: "All time high",
headerImage: "https://june-changelog.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/changelog_ath_cd256d0719.png",
authors: [
(...)
If you let me know how you would see this working, I'll try and get something working tomorrow.
Honestly as a v1, I'd just love for you to parse out the whole text file and give me a basic markdown editor!
I don't particularly care about having advanced filtering or of parsing my "meta" data
The editor will kinda work for individual mdx files, just not collections. I guess you could try the following to see:
media: public
content:
- name: changelog
label: Changelog
type: file
path: pages/changelogs/2022-in-review.mdx
format: code
I can probably get collections to work though in the next few days. I'll let you know.
Nice. Does it support multi-projects? I got a lot of sites and dont like to have to have a seperate CMS for each.
Yes:
- There's an online version, you can just go to https://app.pagescms.org
- You can switch between repos and branches straight from the interface (just click on the repo menu in the top left corner).
Perfect! Will check it out!
I've been developing premium themes for Hugo & Jekyll for many years at https://www.zerostatic.io so I have tried quite a few Git based CMS.
My favourite was Forestry (RIP) which was replaced by TinaCMS which simply didn't solve the same problem and it was for React websites anyway. CloudCannon now offers something similar to Forestry but requires you to host with them. Netlify CMS had potential but always felt poorly built and fragile, it was turned into Decap CMS when Netlify abandoned it. I admit I have not tried Decap, maybe because I never liked Netlify CMS.
Forestry was right in the sweet spot. It had the following.
* Able to be installed "over the top" of a markdown based site at any stage of the project without deep integration into the codebase. * Does an OK job at inferring content types from folder structure+ssg type and fields from frontmatter, writes config as flat files to git. You can edit these to refine/improve the inital schema. * no lockin to a specific hosting provided.
Look forward to trying Pages CMS
Tina CMS is not only for React websites. It runs well with SSGs such as Hugo, Astro, Gatsby, Jekyll, Remix, 11ty: https://tina.io/docs/frameworks/other/
I agree with a lot of your points.
Does an OK job at inferring content types from folder structure+ssg type and fields from frontmatter, writes config as flat files to git. You can edit these to refine/improve the inital schema.
That's what I want to spend some time working on next week as I think the onboarding process is far too difficult right now.
This is great as it is, but I would love to see support for posts in plain HTML. There's a huge potential for static sites generated by Webflow and other platforms like it. Hosting costs are the biggest issue with these platforms. It would help so many designers and marketing teams that don't have access to a developer or simply don't want (or don't know how) to set up themselves a Jekyll, Next.js, Astro, Hugo, or Nuxt website.
You can save `.html` and `.mdx` single files, I just don't have great support for collections yet (I'll need to sort out a few things as right now it expects a frontmatter to display the table).
So are you saying that you would appreciate an editor that saves your posts in plain old html?
Any preference of storing said posts in a database or .mdx markdown file?
So the site has to hosted on GitHub Pages or just the website code needs to be using GitHub? Eg what if I have the site hosted elsewhere that just relies on GitHub commits?
Just the code.
For example, https://pagescms.org is an 11ty website:
- The code is hosted on GitHub: https://github.com/pages-cms/website - The site is built and hosted by Cloudflare Pages
You can have a look at the config there: https://github.com/pages-cms/website/blob/main/.pages.yml
Perfect, thanks! Awesome stuff here I think it’s going to be what a large swath of users have been looking for!
Is there a way to configure this with media colocated with posts (i.e., not in a /media folder but in/a/post/subfolder/image.png)?
Both the content collections and media can filter by file extension so you could very well have something like:
media:
input: posts
output: /posts
categories: [ image ]
content:
- name: posts
label: posts
type: collection
path: posts
fields:
- { name: title, label: Title, type: string }
- { name: body, label: Body, type: rich-text }
Interesting. I need to dig into this because this looks like a good solution to my editing dilemma. Thank you for the work, and for the response.
Good to see further development in this space. Would be interesting to see how it compares to Decap CMS https://decapcms.org/ and Static CMS https://www.staticcms.org/
Me personally I'd like to see something that supports easily creating and using different types of objects besides pages (such as: events, books, recipes, etc.), like content types and fields and views in wordpress or drupal, ideally aligned with schema.org like https://www.drupal.org/project/schemadotorg I think Hugo might support content types in YAML or something.
Also try Tina CMS or ProcessWire.
You can configure whatever content type you want with nested fields, lists, etc. [1]
Disclaimer: I used to work a lot with Drupal 10+ years ago. I more or less wanted the same kinds of features in Pages CMS.
What the hell is going on with the little sentences in that example? I thought it was supposed to be like, a bad VC rap joke song or something? I was looking for rhymes. It's really lame.
Sorry for that: the titles are indeed lame. But they're mine. And I kinda like them.
They're the titles of the author's blog posts: https://ronanberder.com/ (see bottom of page) - i.e. it's a screenshot of them using it for their own blog.
Nice to see a new entry in the git based CMS realm, I really appreciate that you seem to understand the importance of a good user experience for editing content!
Am I gathering correctly that this does not actually require you to host a backend somewhere? The GitHub OAuth will work even if the CMS is just statically hosted on Cloudflare Pages / Netlify? This was something I always found a little strange about Netlify CMS / Decap, the fact that it required you to either use Netlify or self host their git-gateway.
Edit: Nevermind, I saw it does the auth through serverless functions https://github.com/pages-cms/pages-cms/tree/main/functions/a... I guess it's impossible to do it frontend-only, looks like a fair compromise to me
That's the lightest I could figure out to get OAuth rolling, but it does almost nothing and doesn't store your token.
You don't have to host anything if you use the online version, but you can self host it fairly easily for free on Cloudflare Pages: https://pagescms.org/docs/development/#deploy-on-cloudflare
Yeah, github OAuth doesnt support a web client only flow, so you at least need a backend to forward along the response to the client.
It's pretty much just that cross site requests are disabled.
I was just thinking this morning how I wanted something like Decap CMS but a bit simpler. Got this running on Cloudflare in ten mins and it seems great so far. Thanks!
Great to hear, and glad I did not lie about it being easy to deploy.
Do get the updates I'll be pushing in the next few days as I'm sure I'll find bugs here and there (I just pushed a hotfix 5 minutes ago [1]).
[1]: https://github.com/pages-cms/pages-cms/releases/tag/0.2.1
One thing have been missing for static CMS for me is the ability to upload my image to 3rd party like uploadcare.
I'm working on support for things like S3 and R2.
Following one of the comments in this thread, I reviewed two other products in this space - https://www.staticcms.org/ and https://decapcms.org/.
It looks like the webpages are almost a direct copy of one another, one in dark mode and one in light mode, one with a community strip and professional services and one without
I'm a technical product marketer, and I find this type of landing page copying amusing to no end.
That's no accident: from the Static CMS readme:
Static CMS is a fork of Decap (previously Netlify CMS) focusing on the core product over adding massive, scope expanding, new features.
This made me think of http://prose.io which I remember was a thing 10 years ago. Pleasantly surprised it still is a website, not sure if it still works. But I remember the basic idea being similar, except Jekyll only.
Oh yeah, I loved Development Seed (the team that created prose.io) back in the day. They went on to create Mapbox.
Tried it out,
"the branch master doesn't exist, redirecting you to the default branch (master)"
master exists
Ouch!
Is it a public repo? I'd love to have a look.
This is awesome! It's exactly what I've been looking for. Can you have multiple types of Jekyll collections (posts)?
Yeah, as many collections and single files as you want.
If you don’t have an existing repo/site, can you start from scratch via this webui/CMS to create a new repo/site via some sort of SSG boilerplate/template etc? If that’s not already there it might be a good feature to add.
I was working on it last week and dropped it to make this release.
On the home screen you'll have the ability to choose from a few repos to fork with pre-configured CMS: vanilla, Next.js, Astro, 11ty, Hugo, Jekyll...
I'm still curating the projects I'll be using as a starting point, so do let me know if there are templates for your favorite SSG that you'd like me to consider.
The more challenging feature is building a configuration wizard that figures out your content structure for you. I think this will adoption a lot as the main friction right now is around getting a working config file up and running.
amazing concept, would be even more amazing if you could be able to deploy this on other places besides github pages. (cloudflare pages?) or anything else..
i see is supported already, could be neat to setup blogs thank you
I love it! I do have a quick question. It seems like you can create files with the correct filename for jekyll but it doesn't seem like there is a way to tell it that the date only exists as the file name? jekyll dates within the files do override the file dates but are actually not required. It would be nice if I could pull the date from the file name. I hope I'm just overlooking something simple.
I had support for that but dropped it as I was trying to get that release out and didn't have time to refactor it properly (I made a lot of changes in the past couple of weeks).
I do use Jekyll for a few sites of mine and need this to work, if only to sort my posts. Expect this to be added back in the next few days.
I'll drop a line here once it's released.
I've setup Decap CMS before, back when it was still called Netlify CMS. I loved the core idea of keeping all your files in Git and tracking them normally but like you said, it was just too hard get up and running and was very quirky, always thought to myself: "I wish someone would make a git based CMS like this but something that's easier to run with a less wired config / UI, seems like you did just that. Congrats!
I found DecapCMS setup quite easy the last time I did it. What roadblocks did you hit?
Any word on S3 media support? I have a few content heavy sites. And that would be essential to be practical to switch to.
I've started looking into the APIs for it, I am rebuilding a site that has a lot of heavy media so kind of need it too. Realistically, 4 to 6 weeks.
This looks really cool and useful for me as a writer first and developer second.
This is the type of thing I wish I would use my skills for. Instead I'm jealous and going to use it. Got it set up in 5 minutes, now to work on my post backlog.
There's also Lektor CMS: https://www.getlektor.com/ It's quite mice solution to the whole problem (simple hosting + simple editing).
great work with the explainer video etc. good luck w/ the project @ OP.
This reminds me of one of my weekend projects from a couple of years ago: a blog based on GitHub issues.
I have tried and tried to make Decap cms work for my huge go hugo site. I just could never make it work without refactoring a LOT of my code.
I just tried this out, and after an hour of work, I managed to get it working for my weird use case! It's way slicker and better performant than decap. Fantastic job!
The main issue I've had with Decap and Front Matter:
I have a flat file with hundreds of entries for a _collection_. (Yes, I know I'm misusing this, but I don't have time to refactor everything)
But for my use case, I don't want to have a folder with a file for each entry. I want a flat yaml to act as the collection.
in case anyone is looking for 'Notion as CMS' can check my blog repo https://github.com/GorvGoyl/Personal-Site-Gourav.io
Interesting. https://gdocweb.com/ takes a different path to this by converting Google Docs to Google Pages sites.
Ah, damn it. I had this idea in my notes for a while. Too slow.
I have been wanting a simple CMS which is effectively just a layer on top of GitHub for a while, I took a stab at it a couple years ago but bounced off so I'm very excited to see this! Definitely going to give it a try.
how would I add a new type of field?
this seems real cool at first glance. can't wait to try it out.
I randomly found this a few days ago was planning on giving it a shot. Thanks for sharing!
I was always looking for a good web interface for Hugo. Static site generators are nice...but sometimes you really just want to drag and drop and image and write a short post without all the extra hassle of moving the file to the post directory, linking it with the file name in the post, then preview is broken because of some path issues etc.
This looks and sounds great...
I'm currently using contentlayer [https://github.com/contentlayerdev/contentlayer] to manage docs and blog content, mostly .mdx files on urlbox.com.
It works well with next.js but unfortunately is abandonware now.
I also have a few custom remark/rehype plugins.
You're right it is a pain to update articles buried in your repo especially with less technical team members. I already tried out TinaCMS to try and solve the editing issues, but their editor wasn't so nice, and it seemed to implicitly make a commit on every tiny change to any content, so I'm really hoping I could use something like this to edit my already existing content...
This looks superb - very timely as I have been looking for something like this recently for a project
This is very cool! I recently started managing my Astro site content with Notion as a CMS, thanks to `notion-to-md` [1] and `@notionhq/client` [2] but media management is a hassle.
I had been planning to re-host Notion media files to Cloudflare R2 and rewrite content, but it might just be simpler to use Pages CMS due to built-in R2 support.
But also, I like using Notion apps on the go. Hmm.
1. Does the template have to look like that, or can I have almost any template I want ? 2. does the repo have to be public?
Nice, i've been looking for something like this in a long time! Will play with it later today
I am looking into GitLab and Bitbucket, but I don't plan on supporting generic Git, unless I can find a way to slap an API in front of it. I'll add that to the backlog.
Maybe you could add support for Gitea? It’s a pretty handy way to slap an API in front of git and it’s much simpler to self host than GitLab.
Aspects of the API look fairly similar to GitHub actually. I'll look into it.
How much of your API is dependant on GIT like semantics and how much could work with "plain files" storage?
It's neat to be able to transplant a CMS on top of other services that don't necessarily deploy by CI pipes, I made a DAV plugin(basic auth) for Netlify (back before the forks) so as long as a server supported listing(only DAV dependency really), GET, PUT and DELETE you could just plunk down the CMS files somewhere and point to the DAV share.
I believe Netlify CMS has an actual backend interfacing with the various Git systems they supported. Pages CMS is different in that it's a pure front-end app. I have a couple tiny serverless functions to help authenticate you with GitHub, but then after that there is no backend involved. That means I need some API for the front-end to interact with, at least for now.