Hi all! I am a Web Developer who is looking for a backend solution I can use for my websites. My clients often have product catalogues, photo galleries, blogs and other website features that can be better managed by a flexible database, such as NocoDB.
I have been testing NocoDB, trying to implement it as a backend for a blog, but have come across a blocking issue: how to store the ‘post body’ in the database? It seems the Rich Text Field would be a perfect fit for the ‘body’ section of a blog post, but editors will need to add images and/or videos in the middle of the body — and it seems the Rich Text field doesn’t support that…
Has anyone here used NocoDB as a backend for a blog? If so, how did you overcome this limitation?.. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated!
A ‘post body’ is essentially a sequential list of ‘content blocks’, where each block is either ‘text content’, ‘image content’ or ‘video content’. Does NocoDB have a way to create a list of links in one record to different records in other tables? — in database terms this is sometimes referred to a ‘polymorphic relationship’, where you have a ‘one-to-many’ relationship but the “type” of record (ie., which table it’s from) can vary.
The images are signed and are ephermal by nature. SO nocodb is not ideal for CMS usecase. Hacking around these things should be possible but not advised.
Like most Web Developers these days, we target small-to-medium businesses, with a very limited budget. After designing, coding and delivering their website, we charge what they consider to be a “premium” for hosting, which is about $40/month. Out of that $40 we have to cover hosting costs, as well as the cost of any other third-party tool we need to use for the site — which will include things such as an ethical analytics tool (like Umami), and more.
We looked at a myriad of backend tools, including most headless CMSs around — and they are ridiculously expensive, and clearly targeting the corporate market. Contentful, Prepr, Cosmic, all excellent CMSs, but with entry-level pricing that starts at $300/month. Then there are the ‘cheap’ ones, like Strapi, Directus and Caisy, which cost between $25-$50/month — and will sometimes charge per user.
In that scenario, NocoDB is a no-brainer, because we can setup a self-hosted instance on PikaPods starting at about $5/month.
NocoDB is incredibly stable, and amazingly full-featured. Unfortunately for us, the content for websites is often multi-media rich: users need to be able to intersperse images, videos and downloadable files within their text. This is the ONLY area where NocoDB is lacking. If NocoDB were to extend its Rich Text field to allow for embedding of attachments within the field, then it would be perfect — and usable in a wider range of scenarios (eg., as a backend not only for blogs, for also for product catalogs, real estate listings, photographers’ galleries, review sites, and more).
Thank you so much for the all the details. However, nocodb is into building internal business application instead of CMS. And I believe, a CMS has much more to offer other than rich text as they are are custom built for it.
NocoDB would be absolutely perfect for every CMS use-case I can think of, if it were to extend its Rich Text field. A ‘headless CMS’ is, after all, essentially an internal business application.
Have you considered using Markdown? Depending on your frontend, you could include HTML tags for images/videos. Use something like n8n to run conversions between rich text, markdown, and html.
