Some SSGs, like Jekyll, Hugo, Astro, and Eleventy, have strong opinions about how to organize the content in your repository. CloudCannon can run automatic processes on these SSGs and provide basic editing out-of-the-box. Gatsby takes a less opinionated approach and allows you to decide where and how content is stored. This means that for Gatsby, CloudCannon’s out-of-the-box options only include the source editor.
CloudCannon has a few concepts that make organizing data easier:
- Data — These are standalone data files. This is ideal for site configuration or files that don’t need to be repeated. Data is edited by altering a single file.
- Collections — A collection is a single folder of files with a repeated format. For example, a collection might include pages, blogs, staff members, or recipes that share a format. Collections are edited by altering any file or adding more files.
CloudCannon supports a set of file formats for files in Data or Collections:
- Structured data files: JSON, YAML, TOML, CSV, TSV
- Markup files: HTML, Markdown, MDX
- Combination files: HTML with front matter, Markdown with front matter, MDX with front matter
Front matter refers to a section at the top of a markup file that contains structured data. CloudCannon supports JSON, YAML, and TOML front matter. Markdown comes in many flavors, so be sure to check out configuring your Markdown engine.
If you need another supported format, get in touch with our support team, and we would be happy to look into it.
Updating Gatsby to use file data#
Now that we have the terminology covered, it’s time to organize our content.
To get the most out of CloudCannon, it's best to make sure your content is separate from your templating and routing logic. We recommend storing your page content in files using one of the file formats listed above. Markdown with front matter is a great choice for storing content because the front matter can be easily edited in the Data Editor and the Markdown content Content Editor.
We recommend one content file per page, stored within a content/ folder.
With your content nicely organized, you'll then need to fetch this data into your page components. This can be done by using Gatsby's GraphQL queries.