In this book, you will learn all about creating a website using Gatsby, getting its content from Netlify CMS, a free content management system from Netlify. We’ll start with a bare-bones template project and install and configure Netlify CMS from scratch.

In Chapter 1, we’ll look at the Jamstack and what a content management system is. We’ll talk about headless CMSs and introduce Netlify CMS.

Chapter 2 is a Gatsby crash course. If you have built a site with Gatsby before, you can probably skip this chapter, as it is a very basic overview of Gatsby. Conversely, if you haven’t been exposed to Gatsby before, this introduction should be enough to get you going.

We’ll start setting up the example project, a coffee shop website, in Chapter 3. We’ll take care of signing up for GitHub and Netlify if you haven’t already and also get your version of the example project deployed on Netlify.

In Chapter 4, we’ll start adding Netlify CMS to the project. This covers installation of the CMS and creation of the configuration file. We’ll set up the blog content and integrate with the Netlify identity service.

In Chapter 5, we’ll take a tour of the CMS user interface, and create our first piece of content: a blog post. We’ll also look at how to add images to blog posts.

We’ll take the content created by the CMS and start integrating that with Gatsby in Chapter 6. We’ll configure some Gatsby plugins which will add the blog content to Gatsby’s data model.

Chapter 7 is all about creating pages from data. It will introduce the Gatsby Node APIs and show how Gatsby dynamically creates pages by combining data with a page template.

Eventually, we’ll end up with too much blog data to show on a single page, so in Chapter 8, we’ll learn how to paginate the blog posts. We’ll split the blog post listing into several pages (which are also dynamically created).

Up to now, the content on the landing page, such as the hero image and tagline, is managed in the source code. Chapter 9 will explore how to make this content dynamic and editable from Netlify CMS. We’ll make several elements of the landing page configurable from the CMS, allowing the page content to be updated without writing a line of code.

In Chapter 10, we’ll create a menu for the coffee shop. We’ll create new content definitions in the CMS configuration for menu categories, items, and prices.

Gatsby has some plugins that can help generate more efficient images to improve page load time. We’ll look at how to do this in Chapter 11.

In Chapter 12, we’ll see how we can customize the CMS user interface, extending it with a custom preview component so that we can see a live preview of how the menu looks from within the CMS.

Finally, in Chapter 13, we’ll look at how to leverage Netlify CMS’s editorial workflow, creating draft content and reviewing it via GitHub pull requests.

We’ll close the book in Chapter 14 with some discussion of Netlify CMS beta features and pointers to more Netlify CMS resources.