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.
Just finished migration from Gatsby Cloud today, also as a loyal customer for years and it’s now hitting home that this feature is totally missing.
Safe to say our clients are very annoyed as this important aspect of GC has just been pulled from underneath their feet. Totally understand it makes sense to sunset GC and bring everyone into Netlify but to compromise an integral feature is absurd. Really disappointing.
We understand sunsetting features is always painful, and we’re sorry for the friction it might be causing.
This sunsetting enables us to focus our resources on even better replacement features, as we agree that the ability to see a CMS preview is extremely important.
Stackbit takes previews one step further and allows visual in-place content editing, fully synced to the CMS.
Referring to the migration email sent, I just wanted to clarify that the migration to Stackbit previews does NOT require developing a source plug-in and should involve minimal work, if at all. To get an even better experience, including visual in-place editing, might require more work depending on the content sources used, and we’re happy to answer any questions and provide guidance about either option.
While we believe that the migration to Stackbit is the better path and will provide a very similar, and probably better experience for most people, another option that requires no specific implementation at all is using Netlify deploy previews (non production, browseable builds). The experience would be different and not as fast, but it will serve as a solution to preview CMS content before publishing it to production.
Just to clarify, there is no support for WordPress in SlackBits and what we are asked to do is migrate all of our content into SlackBits CMS. Is that assumption correct or is there a hidden setting/instructions somewhere that would allow us to continue using CMS Preview in WordPress while we migrate to Netlify?
Hey @theGrayGranda .
Stackbit isn’t a CMS and we don’t offer one, but it can be connected to any data source. A production Wordpress connector doesn’t currently exist but you can create your own using the publicly available interface: Content Sources Interface | Netlify Create Docs. If you decide to go that route, please let me know so we can make sure we’re guiding you correctly.
Otherwise, you can use one of the fully productionized connectors like Contentful, Sanity, DatoCMS or simply storying data in git (which is what I’m assuming you referred to as the Stackbit CMS).
Hope this helps,
Dan
If anyone else out there is using Gatsby with Sanity, I just want to say that it’s possible to setup a pretty awesome solution using Sanity’s preview-kit.
You can see a video of our solution in action here: Dropbox - CMS Previews.mp4 - Simplify your life
If you want our help setting up this solution contact me through a DM or my email francisco@digitalspiders.io.
