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Using Gatsby with Contentful

For sites with large teams, complex page layouts, and advanced content review processes, using Contentful with Gatsby can create easy-to-manage, decoupled content and development workflows.

When Is Contentful a Good Idea?

Contentful is great for:

  • Complex page layouts with multiple sections per page
  • Teams with multi-stage content creation and review processes
  • Teams who prefer a simple web interface for editing content

Contentful is not-so-great for:

  • Managing user-generated data, like comments
  • A company that requires all tools to be on-premises
  • Teams with access control restrictions and less than $200/month in CMS budget

What Does It Take to Implement Contentful?

Many CMS solutions, such as WordPress and Drupal, involve managing and configuring self-hosted software. Contentful’s SaaS platform removes the hassle of managing your CMS code on-premises.

Hooking up Contentful to Gatsby takes just a few minutes:

  1. Create a Contentful account
  2. Add our Contentful plugin to your Gatsby site
  3. Configure the plugin with your Contentful credentials
  4. Access all your Contentful data using GraphQL queries

Because your content team is able to define schemas for content, there’s no complicated mapping of custom fields or other bespoke code into your Gatsby site. This means your content writers can get all the advantages of Contentful’s powerful content management tools without adding any extra complexity or time burden for your developers.

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