16 Glossary - 18F/federalist-jekyll-netlify-cms-guides GitHub Wiki
Content Management System (CMS)
A content management system (CMS) provides an interface for non-developers to add, edit, and remove content. That content can range from a paragraph of text to a menu label.
You don't need to be a developer or know code to update content on ChildCare.gov. You'll be able to perform many content-editing tasks directly in the CMS, which uses Markdown, a plaintext formatting syntax that automatically gets converted into HTML.
The most common questions we hear are 1) Will I break something? 2) Will my change be live immediately? It’s the developers’ job to make sure neither happens. Each team creates a workflow for approving and viewing content before it’s live on the site.
Federalist
Federalist is a government platform that hosts over 100 sites across federal agencies. It has built-in features that allows both technical and non-technical users to make website changes quickly, apply 508-compliant website templates, and follow the United States Web Design System (USWDS) so that the public has a better and more consistent user experience across government websites. Federalist provides previews on different URLs. It’s also used for authentication.
Currently, Federalist supports the following types of sites:
- Jekyll (
beta.childcare.gov) - Gatsby
- NodeJS
GitHub
GitHub is a repository for website files. GitHub can store multiple versions of a file at any given time. However, there is only one version that is published live. Content won’t be visible on the live website unless it is merged into the main branch on GitHub. Netlify CMS uses GitHub to handle merging so you don’t have to go into GitHub to publish content. There is no infrastructure (e.g. a database) that ACF OCIO needs to manage. All of the content is stored in GitHub, not in a database.
Static Site Generator (SSG)
A static site generator (SSG) is a platform that generates a full static HTML website based on raw data and a set of templates. An SSG automates the task of coding individual HTML pages and gets those pages ready to serve to users ahead of time. This results in a scalable, more performant site.
Learn more about SSGs at https://jamstack.org/generators.