inside the story system.

a CMS is a bad trade. you get WYSIWYG editing but you pay with: another login, a hosted database, a separate permissions model, version control that isn’t git, and — over time — vendor lock-in that makes migrations brutal.

for a studio that writes maybe three posts a week, this trade is laughably bad.

so our content system has no CMS. it has three parts:

1. mdx files in content/stories/ — markdown with jsx components mixed in.
2. seven section components — video, photo, photoGrid, textBlock, headline, quote, gallery.
3. git — commits are the publish button. vercel deploys them.

writers asked for more components. we kept saying no. every new component is a decision writers have to make. the goal is for the content to be the interesting part, not the layout knob-twiddling.

here’s what you can do with seven:

side-by-side photos, for a before/after or a set of related frames. the PhotoGrid takes an array — you can pass two images or twenty, the layout adapts.

for a single image, use Photo. for a scrollable set, use Gallery. for a motion moment, use Video.

we never gave them the extra components. they never came back to ask again. turns out the discipline helps.