Building static site from contentful

[micahrye]

Is it possible to use a service like Contentful with Gatsby. I want to build a static site from content stored/created on Contentful. Unfortunatly it does not work, and while the data is retrieved while running develop server, the build does not capture/use the content from Contentful.

This hybrid feature would be nice, pointers on where to start building this into Gatsby would be welcome too.

[KyleAMathews]

Hi how are you doing the integration now? I'm not overly familiar with
contentful. Probably what you need to do though is write a script which
automatically copies down content to files within the Gatsby pages
directory.
On Fri, Jun 10, 2016 at 11:49 PM micahrye notifications@github.com wrote:

Is it possible to use a service like Contentful
https://www.contentful.com/ with Gatsby. I want to build a static site
from content stored/created on Contentful. Unfortunatly it does not work,
and while the data is retrieved while running develop server, the build
does not capture/use the content from Contentful.

This hybrid feature would be nice, pointers on where to start building
this into Gatsby would be welcome too.

—
You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.
Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub
#324, or mute the thread
https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe/AAEVhynfYIu0ApmoiLxjzr0cu8yNaCY8ks5qKlpzgaJpZM4IzfNI
.

[ivanoats]

I'm working on this too - I have a build step that connects to Contentful and then writes out the .md files needed for the build. It's not totally finished / working yet. Planning on calling the script via my npm scripts before gatsby build. I can ask if I can open source the code.

[micahrye]

Ivanoats - if you can open source it I would be interested in contributing rather than starting from scratch. I want to use Gatsby for a project and in scoping out the project contentful fits one side and I want to use reactjs and Gatsby for the other side.

Kyle - not doing any integration yet. Just been scoping a project and deciding on tech approach. I think such support for something like contentful will be a nice addition though.

[KyleAMathews]

@micahrye @ivanoats nice 👍 FYI, I'm going to be working fairly soonish on a site that will pull content from Evernote & (probably) Dropbox. I have some ideas for APIs that could be added to Gatsby that would simplify integration with 3rd party content sources as it'd be nice if each content source could have a robust Gatsby plugin. It'll be a little while so continue on with your approach but let's collaborate on a core solution down the road a bit.

[micahrye]

sounds good, will do :)

[ivanoats]

Here's the script I am using to pull down data from Contentful:
https://gist.github.com/ivanoats/e79ebbd711831be2536d1650890055c4

I run this via an npm run script before gatsby build.

I would love to work on a plugin or get ideas on better architecture for this process.

[erlend-sh]

I have some ideas for APIs that could be added to Gatsby that would simplify integration with 3rd party content sources as it'd be nice if each content source could have a robust Gatsby plugin.

That sounds awesome. We've been playing with ideas like these for Discourse as well. Would for instance love to see a straight forward way to use Discourse as a backend for docs solutions like this one:

http://blog.discourse.org/2016/05/using-discourse-as-a-community-powered-wiki/

[KyleAMathews]

@erlend-sh the new version of Gatsby will be perfect for this! Totally love the idea of Discourse-powered sites as well.

If you read the "Pull instead of push" section in my recent blog post https://bricolage.io/gatsby-open-source-work/ basically what you'll be able to do for Discourse is create a GraphQL schema that wraps the Discourse REST API and then construct a site where page-providing components query Discourse directly for the data they need.

With Gatsby's support for themes, you'd be able to distribute a ready-to-use version of this e.g. for the community-powered-wiki use case.

[micahrye]

Cool. I have been busy between projects, but I did implement something with Gatsby + Contentful. Starting to explore using Gatsby in a hybrid way of static and distributed data. As I get more time I will try and structure it and see if it might be a PR.

[Khaledgarbaya]

Hey Guys,

I am maintaining the Contentful JS SDK and I will be glad to provide help/direction for building the integration.
I think you Using the Sync api through the SDK would be a good idea to pull only the changed/new data and then write to md files as @ivanoats mentionned.

Cheers,
Khaled

Hi @Khaledgarbaya ,

Did you eventually create a plugin or resource on how to get Contentful integrated with gatsby. I wish to discuss further. Our team has decided to use contentful as CMS.
Our goal is to enable content authoring at CMS and clck of button have ability to publish to live website where it runs on gatsby.
Oviously we are looking in hybrid model, where few of content we want to download to local files which can be queried by graphql data layer now in alpha release & for few cases fetch data dynamically.

Regards
Vishal Gupta

[ivanoats]

I am still interested in helping out on this, too. Just let me know if anyone has progressed beyond the snippet I wrote.

[0x80]

I recently worked on a scraping tool for Contentful. It's not completely finished but already useful I think.

It takes the data and optionally converts it to a simple structure that contains only the fields from your models (stripping out the sys metadata). It then downloads the assets either in bundled form per entry or all in one place.

It doesn't have any priority for me at the moment since I'm working with a different CMS now, but I will see if I can release it at the end of this week. I would be interested to see some people collaborate on this.

[Khaledgarbaya]

hi @vishalniit and @ivanoats ,
I started something here but it is not production ready nor fully functioning yet.
Unfortunately, I had to pause working on it due to lack of time.
Please note this is not an official Contentful plugin it was just a personal project I started.
Feel free to grab the code, hopefully, or contribute to it I will be more than happy to help and give guidance.
Best,
Khaled