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jake
jake

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Top 10 Reasons to Use Bael, a NetlifyCMS blog theme

Bael is a free template that gives you an easy way to start a blog that uses modern technologies like static-site JAMstack architecture, CSS grid layout, responsive design, a serverless function that handles emails newsletter signup with Sendgrid, and fuzzy search — all wrapped up in a brutalist aesthetic.

Bael runs using Nuxt.js, Vue.js, Netlify CMS, and is hosted by Netlify. Bael requires an account with Netlify and Github/Gitlab to deploy. A free Sendgrid account and API key is needed to setup the email newsletter signup.

The Top 10 Reasons to use Bael:

  1. It's fast — Bael runs as a static generated, single page application. After the first page loads, pages after that don't require a full page load.

  2. Progressive Web App (PWA) — Bael saves its CSS/JS/HTML and image assets for faster loading, a more reliable offline experience, and the ability to be installed on Android home screens. Bael scores a perfect 100 on the Google Lighthouse PWA audit.

  3. Responsive — The design resizes itself to any device display size using CSS media queries and grid layout.

  4. Built-in Search — find any blog posts with ease. The live search finds misspelled words and instantly updates its results as you type.

  5. Email Signup Form — Use a serverless signup form and collect emails for your newsletter. Powered by Sendgrid and Netlify Functions.

  6. JAMstack — Better performance, cheap hosting, and higher security are just three of the benefits of building websites using JAMstack, a modern web development architecture based on client-side JavaScript, reusable APIs, and prebuilt Markup.

  7. Install Bael in one click — It is easy to have your own blog installed on Netlify's hosting platform. You need an account with Netlify and a code repository service like Github or Bitbucket.

  8. Customizable — Set up your own site icon, footer menus, links, and other options in the admin section of your blog. Available as open source, you are free to modify the code for your own use or for everyone's benefit.

  9. Brutalist design — Functional and minimal, Bael is a response to the overly friendly, and overdone trends in web design today.

  10. It's free — Bael is 100% free to get started with. The theme is free, the CMS is free, the web hosting from Netlify is free, Sendgrid is free up to 2,000 subscribers, and Github/Bitbucket offer generous free plans. Try it out today.

Made by jake101 and available on Github

Top comments (3)

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xabeng profile image
xabeng

Hi Jake,

I've cloned the repo, installed but I can not login to admin.

a1.png

a2.png

Could you guide me how to get over that.

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jasperketone profile image
jake • Edited

Did you set up your identity section?

identity admin section

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xabeng profile image
xabeng

Thanks for your reply, I enabled identity and able to log in now.

Go to localhost:3000/admin. Browser displays “can not fetch” message.

Did I miss something?