Goodfellow

A git-based website builder built on the Puck visual editor.

Goodfellow gives non-technical site owners a drag-and-drop editor at /admin with no server, database or monthly hosting bill. Pages are stored as files in the site's own GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket repository. Every save is a commit, and a free static host (GitHub Pages, GitLab Pages, Cloudflare Pages or Vercel) rebuilds the site. It started with small organizations run by volunteers, and is built to suit larger ones too, where a marketing team runs the content and developers own the code, its blocks and its reviews.

Status: early development. The packages are on npm, released together with one version number, and the open issues show what's planned. The documentation, built with Goodfellow, describes the latest release: what Goodfellow does, how to create a site, and how to write blocks. The demo lets anyone try the admin panel.

How it works

flowchart TB
  editor["<b>Editor's browser</b><br>The admin panel at /admin:<br>the Puck editor and forms"]
  git["<b>Git host: GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket</b><br>content/: pages and settings as JSON<br>public/media/: images and files"]
  site["<b>Static host</b><br>Builds the site and serves it as static HTML"]
  editor <-->|API calls| git
  git -->|a push starts the build| site

• No server. The admin panel is part of the static site and talks to the GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket API straight from the browser. Next.js apps with a server of their own can have it publish for editors instead.
• Instant preview. The editor renders pages in the browser, so editors see changes before anything is published.
• Publishing is a commit. A commit to the main branch triggers the host's normal build. The admin panel shows when the new version is live.
• Content is plain files. One JSON file per page, readable in any diff and portable to other tools.
• Apps too. Builds also write the content as static JSON, which an Expo app for iPhone and Android shows natively, offline too.

Contributing

To report a problem or suggest a feature, open an issue; for security problems, see SECURITY.md. To contribute, see CONTRIBUTING.md; AGENTS.md has the architecture rules and conventions. They apply to human contributors as well as coding agents. RELEASING.md explains how versions are released to npm.

License

MIT

Acknowledgements

Goodfellow is built on Puck and is not affiliated with Puck or its maintainers. The name comes from Robin Goodfellow, the other name of Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Sign-in and backend design draw on Sveltia CMS and Decap CMS.