Jaen

Almost every project in this blog stands on the same foundation, so its story belongs here too. Jaen is the CMS that I develop together with Nico from cronit. Our ambition with it is immodest: bring content management into the 21st century.

What always bothered us about classic CMSes is the separation. Over here the website, over there an admin backend with forms of its own, and between the two a preview that never quite tells the truth. Jaen turns that around. The CMS lives inside the website itself. You log in on the real site and edit right where the content is. What you see is not a preview, it is the page.

Technically, Jaen is an open source CMS for Gatsby. The content is built statically along with the site, so the pages stay fast and can be served without a server, and yet everything can be edited in the browser. That mixture is exactly what we wanted: the robustness of static sites and the immediacy of an editor that is the page itself.

Jaen grew on real projects. PhotonQ became one of its reference sites, netsnek.com in turn came out of the PhotonQ code, and the text you are reading right now is delivered by Jaen. Most recently we made Jaen multilingual. This site therefore exists in German, English, Slovenian, Italian and Japanese, although I only write the German version and the rest is machine translated.

Part of the foundation is also emailwerk, the mail project with Nico that comes out of the same collaboration and that, among other things, sends this site's contact form.

The code is open: github.com/jaenjs/jaen.