About poko

Intro

This is an alpha release. If you like the idea, please come and share your thoughts in the discussions.

poko is many things:

Its goal is to make it unbearably easy to publish content on the web.

Its primary target user is 'The Tech Savvy Writer'.

It is making use of Notion as its CMS (Content Management System); Just write in Notion, click 'Publish' and 1 minute later your site is updated.

You can even directly write MDX in Notion for an extra dose of super powers.

Why Astro

To me, Astro is one of the most exciting tool being built in the world of front-end web development currently. It is a complicated tool aimed at making things easy and performant for the end user (the developer in this case). It builds zero-JS websites by default with smart enhancements.

Why poko

poko is a project of the Supertera collective.

Supertera is:

An overground movement of independent minds aiming for collective growth through individual emancipation and shared knowledge.

'Growth' is defined as 'becoming better and better humans' and opposed to the traditional concept of 'making profit' above all.

poko is meant to be an answer to 'yes, I'd like to [write a blog] [publish my digital garden] [share what I am working on] [...] but I need to create a website first...'.

No more excuses. Be the master of your faith. Write, write, write and publish your content on your own terms.

As to why really the name 'poko'... That is a secret. Maybe if you go on reading you'll find out...

Why Notion

It is free. It is easy. It is popular. It is more powerful than a cloud document. It is less complicated than a classic headless CMS. It has an API.

The goal is one day to support more sources, especially more FOSS software. The front-end API would stay the same (somewhat opinionated) structure to allow easily building on that side too (components, themes, ...).

'Everything in the CMS'

Users do not write code.

And why should they?!

For a lambda user, the maximum effort is a copy/paste. The tech-savvy user will happily copy/paste to achieve something cool but most won't dive into the code and that is perfectly fine!

With the approach we are taking, components, themes, and even complex functionality are all a copy/paste away from one notion page to another.

⚠️ It also means that you need to be careful of the code you copy/paste. If you don't understand what you are putting onto your site, at least make sure it comes from a reputable source!

Why MDX

In the current version of poko, we use MDX to render the content. It is not mandatory though.

For now, (as far as I know) MDX allows more freedom and functionality than the native Astro <Markdown /> component. But we definitely look forward to using more of Astro!

📌 The Astro <Markdown /> component should work just fine for simple content without variables, custom components, ...

📌 We also envision a 'markdownless' version where we use structured data all the way to the HTML composition without resorting to markdown at all.

Any static host

There are a lot of free static hosting providers. Here are a few of them:

What next

Short and long term goals in random order