I'm building a magazine-style website and I'm looking for a CMS that fits a fairly specific set of requirements. It needs to be free without important features being locked behind paid plans, support multiple content types such as regular articles and photo galleries, and let me define frontmatter fields for things like title, subtitle or dek, featured image, author, publication date, categories, and tags. I'd prefer something that isn't WordPress or PHP-based, and it should be relatively easy to manage because I'm not especially technical.
4 Answers
WordPress does match these requirements very closely, especially for articles, galleries, metadata, and an easy admin interface. Avoiding it is understandable, but there’s no technical reason you must use it. If you want a non-PHP system with a similar level of flexibility, Payload is a good TypeScript-based alternative, while Decap CMS is simpler if file-based content is enough.
Ghost could cover the publishing side nicely and is easier to use than most developer-focused tools, but check the hosting and feature limits carefully if your requirement is completely free. For a genuinely self-hosted option, Strapi or Payload are worth investigating, although they require more technical setup.
Astro with Content Collections sounds like a strong fit if you’re comfortable building the site yourself. You can define typed schemas for articles and galleries, keep everything in Markdown with frontmatter, and get useful errors when required fields are missing. It’s free, doesn’t require PHP, and is fairly straightforward once the initial setup is done.
Try pairing Astro with Decap CMS or Keystatic. You get a friendlier editing interface for entering deks, tags, images, and gallery content, while the actual content stays as Markdown and frontmatter in your own Git repository. That avoids hosting costs and unexpected feature paywalls, though the initial configuration takes some work.
Eleventy is another good option for the same Markdown-and-frontmatter approach. It has less built-in guidance than Astro, but it’s lightweight and works well for multiple collections.