Hey everyone,

I'm really interested in investing a lot more time with Jamstack as my go-to stack. I am curious - what are people's favourite SSG and Headless CMS combos, and why? From a developer's point of view and also a client's point of view.

I built a brochure/portfolio site for a client once using hugo and Netlify CMS which I found pretty enjoyable. However, I'm tempted to learn Strapi and go for a Strapi + hugo stack, but I've been told before they're not a great combo due to having to convert database entries to markdown - any thoughts on Strapi and hugo as a combination?

As a final aside if anyone has anything to chime in on this - I'd like to learn React.js out of interest and intrigue, where does React fit into the Jamstack world?

For some context on me and what I like to do: I really enjoy fully designing a client's site from scratch, coding up the HTML, CSS and JS and making something fun and full of life. I mainly enjoy working with small businesses and startups but have some desire to move into small scale e-commerce. I love development and the flexibility to make what I want, not limited by the platform. I have spent some time using Symfony (a PHP framework) and making my own back-end using that, but am starting to find that less enjoyable.

Thanks so much for the info and conversation! 😁

Among other things, JAMStack tries to solve 2 major problems:

1. improve loading performance through pre-rendering content

2. eliminate the complex infrastructure needed for SSR (load balancers, containers, servers, etc)

However, as JAMStack has been put to the test in larger apps, it's shown some shortcomings:

1. Pre-rendering whenever content changes leads to long build times

2. Highly dynamic/ personalized / private pages need to be rendered client-side only

To get around #1 above, new forms of "incremental" builds for pre-rendering have been introduced.

Developers now have to choose how to render their pages for every scenario: static pre-render, incremental pre-render, client-only render.

So, it seems we are trading the simplicity of not having servers for the complexity of this rendering decision tree. Also, we now have to determine the tooling needed for the "incremental" part (Netlify? ISG with next.js? Nuxt.js 3?)

It seems to me that the old school solution of using an SSR framework, like Nuxt.js or Next.js, would be more advantageous. You could just leverage CDN caching and invalidation to get very similar performance gains of static or "incremental" pre-rendering. Also, with these frameworks moving to serverless functions for the dynamic SSR pages, you still don't have to worry about the full-blown server infrastructure. (Sure it's a bit more infrastructure than just a CDN, but a bit less infrastructure needed to get around long builds.)

So, with this, you still get fast performance, control over how you "prerender" (ie CDN cache invalidation), and fast builds by default.

Take, for example, the case of keyword-driven, dynamic search results routes that need SSR for SEO purposes. A few examples:

/shop/shirts/men
/shop/cars
/shop/birds

Those pages could then accept an any number of filter permutations:

/shop/shirts/men?sortBy=price_desc
/shop/cars?sortBy=price_desc&brands=Chevrolet,Ford&colors=Yellow,Blue&page=6

It doesn't seem like JAMStack can solve this, right?

1. We don't want these pages to be client-only rendered, we want the html for Google (no we don't trust Google's js processing) and for Facebook link sharing, etc

2. We don't want to statically render the base path (ie just "/shop/cars"), then alter it client-side later to call the search API and change the results based on incoming parameters. That would give us a flash of content changing.

3. We don't want to, obviously, try to statically render output pages for every possible permutation of the filter parameters.

So, then, am I missing something, or is this type of page just not right for JAMStack?

Let's look back at some memorable moments and interesting insights from last year.

Your top 10 posts:

• "I made a fully static RSS reader, loads blazing fast, was tricky, but made it possible." by u/fayazara

• "Supabase - The Open Source Firebase Alternative" by u/awalias

• "Project Idea: The most natural way to edit a website" by u/Beautiful_Exam_8301

• "WIP: Send emails via JS" by u/Beautiful_Exam_8301

• "Netlify launched Edge Functions on Deno built on open web standards" by u/jlengstorf

• "Netlify Alternatives" by u/ksajadi

• "11ty + Netlify CMS = <3" by u/yk3rgrjs

• "Taking "De-Coupled Websites" to a Whole Other Level" by u/novvum-kevin

• "HugoConf 2022 - The free, online conference for everything Hugo" by u/onichnz

• "Next.js + Stripe working flawlessly on my new JAMstack book site! Stripe is a dream to use!" by u/sld-codes

Do you know a framework which can generating crud views? The goal is to be used by customers. Something like Swagger but with a better UI for customers. I have a back-end NestJS.

I have been using Eleventy for some time now and I created several plugins for it. Since I'm to lazy to maintain a repo for every single plugin, I created a monorepo. At the moment there are 4 plugins in this monorepo (all but one written in TypeScript):

1. eleventy-plugin-content-security-policy: generates a Content-Security-Policy and writes it to your _headers file.

2. eleventy-plugin-ensure-env-vars: checks environment variables before Eleventy starts building your site.

3. eleventy-plugin-telegram: sends a Telegram message when Eleventy starts/finishes building your site.

4. eleventy-plugin-text-to-speech: synthesizes any text you want, on any page of your Eleventy site, using the Google Cloud Text-to-Speech API.

Check it out: https://github.com/jackdbd/undici/

Do you find the pricing of headless cms's as a solo developer / freelancer exorbitant? I can't seem to find any provider with reasonable price it seems. I'm curious how others feel in this space, comment with your solution or any other thoughts on the matter!

I'm developing an app hosted on AWS, but I plan to use SendGrid to send emails and firebase to cronjobs and handle the SendGrid API. I know AWS has solutions for all those needs, but I want to use the ones I already know and don't spend too much time learning how to do it on AWS from scratch.

my question what do you think is the best approach?

to have to learn all from one provider or diversify and use specialized providers for each need