Brevifolia

About

Brevifolia is minimalist blog starter to get you going using Forestry with Gatsby. Check out the demo here

This blog is statically generated by Gatsby, a rendered combination of react components and markdown files. It is preconfigured to work with Forestry as a way to manage your content. Forestry makes changes by editing markdown or data files, uploading media to the correct directory and committing these updates to your repo directly.

The styles were coded & designed by yours truly, using scss with css modules (which are inherently support by gatsby) and the bem naming convetion. The font used is Work Sans.

Quick Setup

Import Directly to Forestry

Using the Gatsby CLI

In your terminal, navigate to where you would like this blog to live, then run

gatsby new [SITE_DIRECTORY_NAME] https://github.com/kendallstrautman/brevifolia-gatsby-forestry
cd [SITE_DIRECTORY_NAME]
yarn dev 

Set-up Locally

In your terminal, navigate to where you would like this blog to live, then run

#clone the repo
git clone git@github.com:kendallstrautman/brevifolia-gatsby-forestry.git

#navigate to the directory
cd brevifolia-gatsby-forestry

#install dependencies & run dev server with yarn 
yarn install
yarn dev

#or with npm 
npm install
npm run dev

A new browser window should open with the dev server running or you can navigate to localhost:8000

Plugins

With Gatsby offering a plugin-rich ecosystem, there are a few key plugins that make this project possible.

• Gatsby-image optimizes image loading and provides the correct file paths for output.
• Gatsby-transformer-remark gives us access to and transforms the markdown files, using also gatsby-remark-images, gatsby-remark-normalize-paths, & gatsby-remark-relative-images to make sure the content in the markdown works properly.
• Gatsby-transformer-yaml allows us to use the data in .yaml files, feel free to add gatsby-transformer-json if you prefer that format for data files.
• Gatsby-plugin-sass lets us write styles using scss or sass.
• Gatsby-plugin-react-helmet extends the well-known react-helmet, allowing you to adjust content in the ‘head’ of your components.

Project Structure

• Site-level configuration is stored in config.json so it can be exposed to Forestry. This file is loaded in the gatsby-config.js to configure Gatsby and all it to be accessible via siteMetaData in your graphql queries.
• Access any of Gatsby's browser api's via the gatsby-browser.js, or load global styles etc.
• Add and access plugin options or siteMetaData via gatsby-config.js
• Access Gatsby's node api's via gatsby-node.js. This is where the creation of new blog pages or nodes is handled.
• Edit styles via src/styles/...
• content/contains all your markdown blog posts, images & data files (e.g. authors list, info page data).
• src/pages is a very important and required directory for Gatsby. This is where all your pages for the site live.
• Blog posts are built from a template that can be accessed at src/templates.
• The pages & template are comprised of components from src/components.

Using Forestry as your CMS

The .forestry directory contains all the settings information and frontmatter configuration to allow Forestry to setup the sidebar structure and editing capacity for this blog. After importing this blog into forestry, you can access and edit all of the content via the sidebar.

You can add new blog posts, data files, or entire pages and sections to fit your needs. You can also customize how media is handled, by configurating gitLFS, Cloudinary, S3, or Netlify Large Media.

You can set up a remote admin for content editors to log in directly to yoururl.com/admin to make content updates.

Instant Previews

The instant preview method spins up the Gatsby development server for a long-lived preview that can quickly respond to content updates. When using instant previews, your preview command should be the develop command. The development server spawned by this command should be available over port 8080, and bind to 0.0.0.0. The forestry:preview command in this project's package.json will spin up a Gatsby dev server compatible with Forestry's instant previews.

Deploy Options

Netlify is a great way to easily deploy sites. There's no special setup you need to do with Forestry to deploy with Netlify. When Forestry makes commits to your repo, Netlify will auto-trigger a rebuild / deploy when new commits are made.