Live Preview with Gatsby and Drupal

A presentation at Decoupled Days in in New York, NY, USA by Shane Thomas

Gatsby and Drupal are a great match for building a fast statically generated site with the administration power of Drupal. However, anyone that has built a production level Gatsby/Drupal website has realized pretty quickly that while it’s great for developers, it’s not the most intuitive experience for content editors.

There are many common content editing dilemmas that show up on Gatsby/Drupal projects:

  • The project requires running a local copy of the Gatsby development server and it needs to be restarted anytime an entity is changed on the Drupal website
  • The project deploys changes when entities are updated or saved but this requires a complete rebuild of the site without knowing how the page will look when it goes live

The team at Third & Grove has been working alongside the core Gatsby team to improve this content editing experience by bringing live preview capabilities to Gatsby sites built with Drupal. This live preview experience means that a content editor can edit a Drupal entity and immediately see what it will look like on the Gatsby site before it gets deployed.

This session is great for developers, site builders, and content editors considering building a Drupal site with Gatsby. It’s also for those that have a Gatsby/Drupal production site but are looking to improve the experience for content editors. Attendees will leave the session with strategies to improve the content editing process as well as knowledge on how to implement live preview on your Gatsby/Drupal sites.

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