July 2018 Summaries

Gatsby's documentation team undertook a redesign of their documentation sidebar to improve accessibility and usability, driven by the realization that the existing structure was becoming cumbersome. The project involved extensive community collaboration, including feedback from a Request for Comments (RFC) process, card sorting exercises, and usability testing with community members. The team evaluated various documentation structures from other platforms like NextJS and ReactJS, ultimately choosing an accordion menu design that balances visibility and organization. They identified common obstacles such as the need for information consistency between tutorials and guides and the desire for more comprehensive "Getting Started" resources. To address these issues, they plan to add more detailed guides and recipes and encourage community contributions to fill content gaps. The redesign process is divided into phases, with ongoing community involvement encouraged through testing and feedback to refine the documentation further.

The Site Showcase for Gatsby, developed by a team including Cassie Beckley, Shawn Wang, and Kurt Kemple, is a searchable and filterable library designed to display sites created with Gatsby. This initiative aims to simplify the process of finding open-source Gatsby site source codes and to demonstrate Gatsby's capabilities to potential clients and collaborators. The project emerged from user feedback and research, which highlighted pain points such as the non-searchable and lengthy Awesome Gatsby list and the lack of visual site representations. The Site Showcase addresses these issues by offering features like screenshots, source code access, site sharing, and submission capabilities. The team is seeking community contributions for future phases and has plans to develop a Starter Showcase with additional filtering options.

Gatsby Inc. announced its first commercial offering, a hosted preview service called Gatsby Preview, designed to address the challenges faced by content creators using the Gatsby framework to build websites. Initially integrated with Contentful, this service allows content teams to preview changes in real-time, thereby alleviating the difficulties of setting up their own preview infrastructure and providing an immediate connection to their work. This new feature is aimed at enhancing the workflow for developers and content creators by offering a live URL where changes can be viewed before going live. The service is currently in an invite-only alpha phase, with plans to expand its integration to other CMS platforms like Drupal and WordPress and transition into general availability. Gatsby Preview is offered free of charge during its alpha phase, reflecting Gatsby Inc.'s commitment to improving the web development experience.

Kyle Mathews, the founder of GatsbyJS, offers a comprehensive collection of resources and community projects related to Gatsby, a popular static site generator built on React. The curated list includes showcases of sites built with Gatsby, libraries of official and community starters, plugins, and themes, as well as tools for developing and building GatsbyJS static sites. Additional learning opportunities are presented through podcasts, videos, tutorials, and livestreams, featuring insights from industry experts like Jason Lengstorf and Mathews himself. The text also highlights various community forums such as DEV Community, Hashnode, Reddit, and FreeCodeCamp where developers can share projects, articles, and engage in discussions about Gatsby. The international appeal of Gatsby is underscored by tutorials and resources available in several languages, including German, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Ukrainian, catering to a global audience. Mathews encourages readers to connect with Gatsby experts for enhancing website performance and invites them to follow his personal updates on tech and founding endeavors.

A new plugin for Gatsby, created by Steven Natera with the help of Kyle Mathews, allows developers to automatically generate pages from components located in any directory within a Gatsby project, addressing the limitation of the default hardcoded src/pages path. This development emerged from community requests for a more flexible folder structure that accommodates different workflow needs without losing the automatic page creation feature. By extracting and modifying an internal plugin, the gatsby-plugin-page-creator was developed, enabling users to specify any desired directory path for component-based page generation through a simple configuration in gatsby-config.js. The plugin, available on npm, has been widely adopted, receiving over 50,000 downloads in under a month, and is celebrated as a significant contribution to the Gatsby ecosystem, enhancing the organizational capabilities of projects while maintaining powerful out-of-the-box functionalities.

Phil Howley, an instructor at the Art Institute in North Hollywood, successfully integrated Gatsby into his Emerging Technologies class, resulting in unprecedented student engagement and project completion. Despite a history of students dropping out as coding became more intensive, this term saw full participation, with each student completing both the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and additional features for their final projects. Howley attributes this success to the appealing nature of Gatsby, which offers speed through static site generation, integrates well with React and NextJS, and facilitates development with tools like Netlify for easy deployment. Students appreciated the instant feedback from hot reloading, the fun and ease of coding in React, and the approachable documentation provided by Gatsby. This positive experience has led Howley to plan further incorporation of Gatsby and related technologies into future classes, indicating a shift toward more modern, efficient web development practices.