28th August 2020
My Gatsby website was initially built using markdown pages. The training course did describe how to hook up Gatsby to the online CMS Contentful. However, I chose to skip that step. Now I have integrated the website with Contentful.
There were a few things that I needed to do. I needed to get all the training courses, static content and the company logos from the home page into Contentful. In order to achieve this, I had to create content models for each type of content. I had to update the graphql queries or write new ones to retrieve the content from the online CMS.
I have now completed that exercise which should allow me to update the website without having to add / update markup files in the future. Great.
In all honesty, signing up is easy, creating content models is easy and the Gatsby plugin for Contentful does the rest. It is all rather painless. I can't quite believe that I have a working CMS in a matter of days that is completely FREE.
However, where you might have some trouble is rendering inline images and adding target blank to your links. You have to manipulate the content after it comes out of graphql. The gist of the approach can be seen on this contentful rich text support ticket.
Training Course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t0vNu2fCCM