15 years as a web lover…
These are my current years of experience in the world of the web development: a world that is often mistreated because ‘making websites’ is considered by most to be like cutting ‘salami’ with the slicer already calibrated.
Unfortunately, as many developers know, this is not really true: in 15 years there has been a whirlwind of technologies, languages, frameworks, libraries in front of us (and maybe we hit our faces). Basic elements, of a good developer, that have been created, destroyed, dead, no longer functioning or maintained … or still excellent.
‘Our’ world is always in constant evolution: never fall behind, never think that you have arrived, never relax.
Precisely for this reason ‘make a website’, creating a MANAGEMENT SITE is NOT AT ALL trivial.
New tools
The desire to create this site was illuminating precisely to try new tools that would allow me to add content in a simple way.
I immediately excluded Wordpress, so as not to necessarily tie myself to the use of a Database and for my idiosyncrasy towards such software … My desire to use a tool linked to React.js did the rest.
Gatsby.js
Gatsby.js, is a static site generator developed with React.js, powered by GraphQL and managed through the use of Webpack: it’s possible to recover the data of your site from multiple sources including calls API, plain-text (or markdown) via GraphQL.
Reasons that led me to choose Gatsby
- It uses innovative, updated frontend technologies and with a large developer community (React.js, Webpack, GraphQL)
- Primary data management through Graphql
- Pre-Build / Generate static files that can be uploaded to a web space or CDN
- JAMStack approach for creating sites: JS, API and markup
- Ability to extend functionality and layout via React.js
- Possibility of integration with CMS Headless like Strapi
Installation
For installation, refer to the more complete resources offered by the Gatsby.js community
- Installation tutorial
- Quick Start
- Using Starters: use boilerplates to generate specific types of sites
Following the quick start (for users with average experience), putting up the first boilerplate on the site took me about half a day, including a minimum of styling and initial configuration … I would say not bad!
For the changes I made for the creation of this site, certainly more expensive in terms of time, please refer to the next contents.