The Gatsby Garage
July 15, 2023
Combining a modern SSG with the editing power of WordPress
Setup
A project built with Gatsby, using WordPress as it's backend. This project was built with the help of this awesome Udemy course by Tom Phillips. Frontend is currently hosted on Netlify, and backend is on my own namecheap server. You can visit the wordpress backend here, but obviously this is only meant for editing content with some idea of what it should look like.
Purpose
I decided to take this course on Udemy since I wanted to learn more about how I can use WordPress, which I'm already very familiar with, combined with a more modern JavaScript framework. While Gatsby has fallen a bit out of favor more recently, I found it very interesting at the time for it's compatibility with so many different data sources and platforms. This was called Valhalla Content Hub (Not going to lie, the awesome name was part of the appeal), but after Gatsby's acquisition by Netlify Gatsby Cloud and Valhalla are both gone. Hopefully to Valhalla.
Alas, Gatsby is still a very interesting tool. It has great solutions for images, GraphQL is not my favorite but it works and is commonly used for this type of stack. Gatsby also has great support with a ton of plugins and a large ecosystem meaning you don't have to do everything from scratch.
Unfortunately I'd have to say Astro, or even Next.js (Which is what this blog is using) is a better choice these days than Gatsby, but I enjoyed this project and learning how to use WordPress in a new way.
