Put the “fun” back in “collaborative blog” with Gatsby

Brian Azizi

Our Tech Blog

Static Sites

  • Most basic kind of site

  • Flat HTLM, CSS and JS

Static Sites

  • No backend!

  • Secure

  • Fast

    • Use Content Delivery Networks (CDN)

  • Reliable

  • Cheap

Ideal for Portfolios, Marketing Websites, Documentation and Blogs

Static Site Generators

 Content 

Static Site

e.g.

Blog Post (markdown)

Web Page

Static Site Generators

Static Site Generators

Gatsby

  • Open-sourced in March 2015

  • July 2017: v1.0 Release

  • 10 days ago: v2.0 Beta Release

  • 22.5K Stars on Github

  • 150K weekly NPM downloads

  • 840 contributors

Gatsby

Great Developer Experience

  • React ❤️

  • Webpack, Hot Reloading, ES6 support

  • GraphQL 

Performance built-in

Optimisation Techniques:

  • Code Splitting

  • Pre-loading Critical Resources

  • Pre-render HTML

  • Inlining Critical CSS

  • Tree-Shaking

  • ...

Speed Index (perceived speed): Avg time at which visible parts of the page are displayed

Speed Index

Time To Interactive (TTI): Time until page is considered minimally usable and will respond to user input

Time To Interactive

Demo 1

gatsby new hello-react-london

Gatsby Starters

  • Boilerplate Gatsby Projects

  • Maintained by the community

  • Good for learning

https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/gatsby-starters/

Gatsby Plugins

  • 3 types of plugin

    • Integration Plugins

    • Source Plugins

    • Transformer Plugins

https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/gatsby-starters/

Gatsby Plugins

  • gatsby-plugin-styled-components

    • Support for react styled-components

  • gatsby-plugin-offline

    • Set up a service worker for your site

  • gatsby-plugin-algolia

    • Add Algolia search to your site

  • ...

Building the Blog

  • Step 1:

    • Add Markdown content to data layer

  • Step 2:

    • Generate pages based on markdown data

GraphQL

  • Used to manage the data layer in Gatsby

  • Explore available data at http://localhost:8000/___graphql

  • Common dev flow:

    • Construct query in GraphiQL

    • Add query to React component

    • Result available as `props.data`

Source Plugins

  • Make additional data sources available in GraphQL

Transformer Plugins

  • Transform existing raw data to more useful format

Extending the Data Layer

  • E.g. get access to files on your filesystem:
  • E.g. transform all markdown data to HTML
  • Plugin:

        gatsby-source-filesystem

  • Plugin:

        gatsby-transformer-remark

Creating Pages

  • Option 1:

    • Add React component to src/pages

  • Option 2:

    • Implement createPages API in    gatsby-node.js

Bootstrap Process

  1. load siteconfig
  2. load plugins
  3. source nodes
  4. transform nodes
  5. create graphql schema
  6. create pages
  7. compile component queries
  8. run queries
  9. Finish

Extend this subprocess

createPages API

// gatsby-node.js

const path = require('path');

exports.createPages = ({ graphql, actions }) =>
  new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
    graphql(`
      {
        allMarkdownRemark {
          edges {
            node {
              frontmatter {
                path
              }
            }
          }
        }
      }
    `).then(result => {
      result.data.allMarkdownRemark.edges.forEach(({ node }) => {
        actions.createPage({
          path: node.frontmatter.path,
          component: path.resolve('./src/templates/blog-post.js'),
        });
      });
      resolve();
    });
  });

Query all markdown files

Create a new page for each file

Specify path and React component

Using the Blog

  • Keep repo on Github

  • Devs draft article in markdown

  • Open PR with new post -> get reviews

  • To publish, merge the PR

Netlify

  • Deploy Static Sites to CDN

  • Integrate with GitHub for Continuous Deployment

  • Deployment Previews

  • Free

Netlify CMS

  • CMS for your static site

  • Content stored in Github repo

Going further

  • Support for multiple authors

  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

  • Google Analytics

  • Disqus Comments

  • ...

Thank You !

Brian Azizi

Gatsby

By Brian Azizi

Made with Slides.com

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