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I'm trying to learn more about static sites and the various tools around them.

So I think:

  • Gatsby and React-Static are tools/way of taking JSON data and making a static fast loading site. Something that can be uploaded right into s3 or a cloud storage bucket and will load really fast.

    • I think netlify is just a series of tools built on AWS that make managing static sites easily?

    • netlify CMS (I think) is a way to be able to put content into github and have it tie into a static site?

    • contentful is a way to take user input/content (similar to a wordpres admin) that outputs JSON. It's like a non-technical user way to input content and output it in a way developers can consume with things like gatsby/react-static

I'm just not really sure how these are related or where there is overlap. Any ideas?

Kyle Pennell
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Got an amazing answer from user Ziinc the [react-static spectrum chat][1]

You're mostly on the right track. Gatsby and react-static are static site generators. By default they're more optimized to load fast (since the starting templates are lightweight), but it is completely possible for poor development skills to make it bloated and slow. both SSGs allow for the pulling in of data from different sources, not just json data during the build step. A static website can be either served from a web host (apache, nginx), or from cloud storage, or even dropbox (i think).

Netlify is a static website hosting service l that allows you to build your website (usually a SSG) from a git service and then be deployed to their content delivery network.

Netlify CMS is netlify's attempt to make it easier for content editors to have a friendly ui to update a git repo (since usually content is placed directly in the git repo, but not always of course). Think of it as a private portion of your website for admins. It is basically a flatfile cms.

contentful is a headless cms that is usually for teams. Headless meaning that there is not online viewing page. it only handles the content storage portion. This allows the decoupling of your content storage and your view layer. they allow a business to outsource the database management and server management to focus on the content. there are many other headless cms options, with a new one popping up everyday. Contentful overlaps with netlify cms at the CMS featureset, but netlifycms is flatfile while contentful has databases and servers hosted for customers.

[1]: https://spectrum.chat/react-static?thread=76bdc0c2-bbfa-460f-a811-8e2fe9008f69

Kyle Pennell
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You are correct on all points. The following is also true and may answer / add to the points above:

I see little overlap but, see them working very well together.

vieko
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