Hi, I’ve been a Netlify user for years, all my clients Gatsby websites run on Netlify, and the only reason I’ve ever used Gatsby Cloud was because of the CMS Preview feature, which to my knowledge is the only frictionless solution to get “real-time” builds that can be used for CMS previews (specifically Sanity).
The feature is not perfect or bug-free, but when Netlify acquired Gatsby I hoped they would bring this feature into Netlify and improve it, and I would no longer have to configure two services for each website!
Instead Gatsby Cloud is being sunset by the end of the month, and neither the migration guide or the blog post even mention CMS preview, so I’m left to believe the feature will simply stop existing and I’ll have to tell all my clients they will no longer have CMS previews.
I do appreciate that I was using this feature for free, but the only reason I didn’t try to convince my clients to pay for it was that it was buggy and I had no reason to believe this was due to being on the free plan, but if it was properly implemented I think some of my clients would gladly pay to have this.
So is there a recommended migration path for this feature? And is there any plan to bring this feature to Netlify at some point?
I just got this email from Netlify with a potential migration path, I haven’t had time to go through the steps and know very little about the suggested service Stackbit to be able to say whether it fits my needs, but I leave the email (screenshot and content) below so other people with the same question can try it if they want. And if you do, feel free to let me know how it went!
As a follow up to yesterday’s Gatsby Cloud Migration email, we wanted to assure you that the Gatsby Cloud CMS Preview feature is supported by Netlify.
Stackbit, the newest visual editing solution from Netlify, actually provides both a preview and a real-time editing environment. Check out the full Stackbit solution here.
From a developer perspective, here’s how it works:
The Stackbit application serves the preview via a remote environment running your development server. To enable automatic content refresh in the preview, you simply add the ENABLE_GATSBY_REFRESH_ENDPOINT environment variable along with Stackbit’s ‘stackbitObjectsChanged’ dispatched event to your highest wrapping Gatsby component.
I agree that the fact they aren’t migrating the Gatsby Cloud’s preview is greatly upsetting. My clients used that feature extensively and it was a breeze to setup. Since I don’t use one of the supported content sources (in-house headless solution), integrating with Stackbit is a big project.
I may have to undertake the Stackbit process but only giving me a month to complete it is pretty rude. So far I’m not enamored by Netlify’s approach with the Gatsby takeover.
