Supporting content management in Grist (e.g. CMS-like functionality)

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I’m evaluating Grist as a potential backend/CMS for several organizations, who naturally use spreadsheets for organizing their content.

The main challenge I’m encountering is lack of an editor — a place where users can enter blog post-like content (e.g. plain text, markdown, some HTML support for embeds), and see that nicely formatted and previewed.

Has anybody figured out a way to do this — enable less-technical users to create blog like content, and save it in Grist? This workflow could potentially incorporate other tools besides Grist as well (e.g. standalone editors, where you could type and preview the content, and then paste it into a Grist cell.)

Could a widget support something like this?

As a potential feature for Grist, one potential approach — you could have a “content preview” type for a column. When a column is set to that option, clicking inside a cell could open an editor pane and a preview pane (which shows a rendering of the content in editor). Perhaps you could select how the editor should render previews of the content (e.g. Markdown, HTML, Plain Text). So the flow would be:

  1. On a column with type “content preview”
  2. You click into a cell to edit
  3. That opens a modal or a new page with an editor and a preview pane (and perhaps the ability to select between Markdown, HTML or Plain Text preview)
  4. You can draft your content in the editor pane, and see the rendered preview in the preview pane
  5. When you are satisfied with the rendered preview of the content, you can hit “Save” and that enters the content from the editor into the cell that you were editing.

As a bonus, imagine if you could also configure a css stylesheet setting for a column like that (maybe at the table level?). And then the preview pane in the editor would render the drafted content with the configured styling, to give an accurate representation of how you can expect the content to appear on your site.

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Answering my own question, it looks like having a table with some content — and adding a Widget to that table, and pointing the Custom URL option to Markdown (and configuring the widget for the column in the table with your content) does pretty much exactly what I’m talking about here! I would be curious if others have used this in production, with clients, and less technical administrators?

Also, it would be cool to explore making a fork of this widget or the renderHTML widget, which included the ability to load a stylesheet in the widget and display the rendered text with custom styles from your website!

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there is the question of how you wil organize the content folder structure. If we think of a Wiki… there are pages… and pages inside pages. And pages inside pages inside pages.