After five months — Gatsby

Theming and live preview: the most important features of a classic CMS now available also in Gatsby.

This is the third post in a series of three.

A hiatus can introduce pain in restarting work on old projects. Frameworks change quickly. Now let’s see how the React ecosystem handles this.

I have React, Gatsby and Storybook projects to update and work on them again.

Gatsby

Gatsby made two great features in the last period: theming and live previews.

With Themes one can assembly Gatsby sites from pre-existing parts. Import a core blog engine, import the marketing website module, or a landing page module — and voila!

I guess this feature will help people to considerably speed up the development process by re-using code written for earlier projects. Great news, Gatsby!

With Live preview editors can preview their work as they got used to with classic CMSs like WordPress: write a post and preview before publish.

Before Live preview the editor had to wait the site to be compiled first, then a preview become available. In sites with many pages (thousands?) this could take minutes.

Verdict

Gatsby is gradually adding what was best in old CMSs still keeping it’s edge — incorporating what’s best on the front-end.

For more and more people — content creators, static site developers — it will be a fully viable alternative replacing … eh WordPress.

Resources

• Themes
• Live preview

To React with best practices. Written by @metamn.