Using Ember / EmberCLI with a CMS

I recently took a job that does a lot of work with various CMS’ (Wordpress, Drupal, etc). Our clients pick which CMS they want their site in and we build it out.

Does anyone have any experience using Ember in this context? My team is extremely flexible on how we do our work and I’d love to start using Ember, but I’m not sure its the best tool for the job / practically feasible.

I’ve had the misfortune of working with WordPress and Angular on a recent project. We ended up using this JSON API plugin, but had to do a lot of work to make the API serve reasonably structured data (basically we manually serialized everything). I imagine getting this to play nice with Ember Data would require a similar amount of work.

In short, you could almost certainly get this working, but it would probably make more sense to look into an API driven CMS service like Prismic.io or Contentful. For the record, I actually really like the idea of an API driven CMS.

Prismic looks pretty sweet. Granted I may just be bamboozled by their really nice UI on the home page but whatever. I’m going to give it a look. The downside to what I’m doing now is that the clients choose their CMS and I must deliver.

Cest la vie.

Cascade server is also a CMS my team has to use a lot. After poking with it I’m not sure if I can make it play well with ember.

Sadness.

I am about to try a “headless” installation of Drupal 7 and use the RESTful module (https://github.com/RESTful-Drupal/restful) to define a JSON API for use with Ember.Js. There is a good presentation from Mikkel Høgh at https://amsterdam2014.drupal.org/session/building-modern-web-applications-emberjs-and-headless-drupal that discusses doing just this.

Supposedly this is going to be a lot easier in Drupal 8, but who knows when that will be ready.

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For Wordpress, drop the json-api plugin and use WP-API. After you serialize things, like wrapping posts in an actual {posts: { … }} structure, it works fine.

That being said, I’d prefer a headless Drupal any day, just haven’t gotten around to it. But I would definitely recommend Drupal 8, not 7, if you plan on doing stuff like this.

Did you have success with this?

I built EmberCMS so that everything is in Ember/Javascript: GitHub - dioptre/embercms: EmberCMS is a javascript only front-end and back-end (fullstack) content management system (CMS) based on javascript, ember, ember-cli, sailsJS, material design lite (MDL) and ember-admin. Authentication, email and a number of other things built in. please check it out and let me know what you think

Looks really cool. I’ll have to poke around it sometime.

I’ve been investigating prismic off and on for a few years. They hopped on the line with me and worked out an integration, but it wasn’t smooth enough to be worth using at the time. API first Cloud CMS that plays nicely with Ember