Using GraphCMS with Gatsby and Netlify to build a CMS driven static website
A couple of months ago we finished evaluating the viability of Reciprocal.dev and I started the not so small task of turning what was about 2 months of work done in my spare time into a service that people would want to buy.
We had built a basic landing page during the validation stage using Gatsby & Netlify in order to enable sign ups and this did the job really well.
This approach started to become a bottleneck though as I was tied up working on the app functionality, and with my co-founder not being as technical as myself, our plans of revamping that one page website into a knowledge base for the product required my involvement and these workstreams couldn’t be run in parallel.
I had known that Gatbsy could create pages from GraphQL after using it during my time building JiffyCV to pull data from our Jira into webpages in order to build a basic roadmap tool. So I started looking for a CMS that would work with Gatsby in order to provide content for it to render.
After scoping out a few solutions we finally settled on GraphCMS as it offered a generous free tier and has plugin for Gatsby that makes generating CMS driven pages very easy.
GraphCMS is a ‘headless’ CMS. That is a CMS that doesn’t render a frontend but…
