Comment by joshrowley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshrowley | Hacker News Reader

I work at a digital agency (http://carrot.is/, hosted on Netlify), and Netlify has become our go to hosting solution for all our static projects. Their API is killer, but what we've fallen in love with most of all is the webhook support. That means we can use an external CMS like Wordpress or Contentful, load that data into the static site generator of choice (in our case roots: http://roots.cx/), and then send a webhook to Netlify to recompile the site every time content changes.

They've also been super responsive to any issues we've had, even proactively contacting us when a build fails with a solution in hand before we even noticed. Everything gets pushed to a CDN so our sites are as fast as they can possibly be. Happy to answer any questions from a customer POV, highly recommend these guys.

Very interested in this - and thanks for the detailed write-up on your blog on how to execute the Netlify/Contentful setup. One question: a lot of pages I work on are of the format "one big page" where you've got all the content on one page, with some navigation element to get you up and down the page. Basically the pages are divided into "bands" or "sections".

When I've tried to build these with static site generators (our current favorite is hexo but I'm going to look at roots), I've found that there isn't a good way to separate out content. We end up with the content being stored in .JADE files which are definitely not content editor friendly. I haven't found anyway to deal with this in a markdown file either. So we end up with a nice solution for the developers, but a poor solution for the content editor.

Do you have any approach to this using Contentful? Do you setup sections as individual entries, or is all the content for a page a single entry?

Lastly, how do clients feel about using Contentful? Is there any concern that they might go out of business? This is the common concern I hear with using anything other than Wordpress and would love to hear how you address it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com