Discussion on "Building a Progressive Blog App with Apollo and Cosmic JS"

Jacob Knaack · 2019-04-22T16:52:08.574Z

Hello stranger. Come with me on a short adventure as we build a fast, simple interface for publishing blog style articles. Something sensible. It should look clean and simple yet have the ability to perform powerful resource fetching with some quer...

Cosmic JS is a headless content management service or CMS, which handles storage / creation / modification of resources. So for a blog you might have 2 resources: Authors and Blog Posts. As an admin of a blog you would log into Cosmic JS and create an Author with some details, and then create a Blog Post with whatever content you want in your post.

Gatsby is a static site generator, building HTML / CSS / JS files based on whatever node / react logic you provide it. So Cosmic JS is just a solution for managing the resources that Gatsby uses to build your static web site files. Every time a blog post is created, Gatsby fetches all data required for the pages it needs to display, then builds those static files are served to the end user.

Ah I see...thank you for the detailed explanation.

Actually, I’m new to Gatsby as well so I’m still trying to wrap my head around how it works.

In my current Gatsby project with no CMS whatsoever, I can still query for posts that are stored locally within my project. There is no system per say that manages the content; my job is to just write things in Markdown and put the files in a posts directory or something like that.

But with Cosmic JS (or other CMS), I can manage my content in a platform that is separate from my Gatsby project. Then, I can just fetch (or transform) the needed content with the Cosmic JS API.

Something I like here is if I want to switch from Gatsby, I can just switch and just fetch things as needed with the Cosmic JS API instead of migrating all my project-stored content into the new website. The website and its content to display are not coupled together (which I guess is where the ‘headless’ term comes from).

At least, that’s my current limited understanding.

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Building a Progressive Blog App with Apollo and Cosmic JS

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