@bodiless/documentation

BodilessJS and VitalDS

BodilessJS is a toolset for building editable websites in a JAMStack. VitalDS is a UI library designed to maximize reuse and extensibility. Both were developed to address two key problems in supporing a large ecosystem of consumer websites:

• How to maximize reuse of a core component library while still allowing for massive differentiation
• How to bring the simplicity and determinism of code-based workflows to content sites, while still providing a first-class user experience.

For more information about VitalDs, See Vital Design System.

BodilessJS is based on the idea that, for many sites, a full-blown CMS is unnecessary overhead and introduces more problems than it solves, including:

• Complex workflows, especially when changes to "content" and "presentation" are linked
• Complex editorial interfaces, especially when "presentation" is treated as "content"
• Increased security vulnerabilities
• Higher hosting, maintenance, and operational costs

CMS's are great for some use-cases--for example when there is a lot of reusable content, where content is highly relational, or where presentation is highly standardized and templatized. However, for the most part, CMS's are simply unnecessary.

Sites built in a JAMStack tend to fall into two categories:

• "Headless" implementations, where content is managed in a CMS and pulled into the site at build time,
• "Bodiless" implementations, where content is managed alongside the code in the repository (often in markdown files).

As you might expect, BodilessJS follows the latter pattern, and provides tools which allow non-developers to edit the content inline using a browser. This is not to say that a website built with BodilessJS can't pull content from an external CMS, but if most of your content is managed externally, there may be other toolkits that better fit your use case.

BodilessJS is being developed at J&J to meet specific use-cases in the consumer marketing space. The design and architecture are based on learnings from many years of experience trying to build and operate a large-scale Drupal 7 platform to support customer-facing sites.

Getting Started

• Follow the instructions to create a new site in our Getting Started Guide.
• Learn the basics of site-building on BodilessJS, see our tutorial: Intro To Bodiless Concepts: Creating a Gallery Page.

Links

• BodilessJS
• Read the Documentation on GitHub
• BodilessJS on NPM

Acknowledgements

Applitools has provided us with the tools to build a high quality toolset by testing our components on a range of browsers and platforms. Thank you.