Custom website CMS to post articles

I have a website that is custom built, using PHP and js/jQuery. We started long ago with Wordpress, but quickly switched to building the website from the ground up, because it enabled us to optimize the website better for SEO and speed.

Previously, articles would be written by ourselves or our partners and then me or my tech intern, would publish the articles on the website. However, we're growing and we need to facilitate our content writers to directly add or edit articles to our website, without being very dependent on our technical people. That means we need some form of CMS. What is the best option in this situation, in your experience? I've identified the following options:

- Using some sort of CMS, such as Contentful. I don't know if such a CMS fits our needs.
- Using something like Markdown and then making a script that publishes the article on the website. This is probably the most work and cumbersome in the future.
- Creating a separate gitlab project, that restricts direct access to all the website files and code, but allows our content writers to publish the articles in a specified form in a subdirectory. Then publish those articles on the website by implementing some minimal code. The nice thing is that code changes by the content writers would directly be updated on the website.

What do you think is best?

Such CMS can be hard to code from scratch. If you don't want to use Wordpress, try Ghost CMS, it should be better optimized.

Otherwise, you can e.g. make Google Docs as your main content source, which can be easily a effectively edited by other people and you just pull the doc content via API where you need.

You probably want to look at some of the newer flat-file and static site CMS. Things like Gravity, Hugo, Jekyll, Kirby, etc. They're a bit of an adjustment if you're only used to WordPress, but they'll probably do much of what you want while limiting the amount of custom work you'd need to do for scaling.

We had the same problem. Texh has enough to do and we wanted to avoid the extra task of adding articles. GraphCMS is what we are using currently and its pretty good. So check out GraphCMS

Thanks for the replies! I've been programming for years and had my fair share of dealing with developer vs marketeer frustrations, so this is opening a new world entirely! I'm glad to know there are several different solutions that can do what I'm looking for. For anyone reading this and being in a similar position to mine: do some research about headless CMS solutions. The wheel has already been invented

After spending time researching whether to go with a main flat-file CMS or main headless CMS provider, I think it will be the latter due to wider possibilities. After some more research, the following CMS' are on the option list:
- Directus
- Prismic
- Ghost

Looking at the stack of our website, PHP is very important. We generate dynamic url's by echoing php variables in the href. That way, we also include certain other files and images on our website. Taking this into regard, how would you rank these headless CMS solutions?

Sounds like you need a headless CMS, have a look at Ghost or Strapi. You can also use WordPress as headless.