Matija Maronhić
Studying Strapi
An open-source headless CMS
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🤔
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Maintaining the site
≠
Maintaining content
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At Orbit
• our documentation is for developers and designers
• we have a technical writer that happens to be good at development
• so we can get away with Gatsby + MDX + bunch of other stu
ff
• but nobody else will know how to update it, including future technical writers
who aren’t tech-savvy
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Headless CMS
• content fetched via API requests
• decoupling content from development
• more
fl
exibility = less likely to be refactored
Why Strapi?
• tried NetlifyCMS (barely), Prismic, and DatoCMS
• options I checked out either didn’t have a free plan or it seemed too limited
• Strapi’s free plan has unlimited API calls
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Contentful?
• great reviews on Twitter
• free plan
• 25K records—I probably read this wrong the last time
• 2 million API calls per month
•
fi
rst paid plan is $489/mo 😅 💸
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Improvement Day plan
1. learn the basics of Strapi
2. integrate it with Next.js or Gatsby
3. pro
fi
t
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Basics
• I was trying to
fi
nd “slow start”
• npx create
-
my
-
app commands usually do too much
this escalated quickly
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Basics
• REST API by default, but supports GraphQL
• comprehensive CLI
• various plugins
• email using services like Sendgrid, Mailgun etc.
• editing stu
ff
sometimes changes
fi
les in the
fi
lesystem
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No content
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Conclusions
• I wish I knew more about backend
• Strapi seems to be very DYI
• so far I’m comfortable with that
• however, I’ll explore Contentful before continuing with this experiment
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General goals
• control over the admin interface
• maximum user-friendliness
• next to zero developer intervention
• editing (eventually) updates the site
• preview 🤞 🤞 🤞