Introducing Contentlayer (Beta): Content Made Easy for Developers – Contentlayer

#Motivation: Thinking of Content as Data

While developers gained more flexibility in the way they can design and structure their site - it also came at the cost of having to take responsibility over how to process and serve the content.

This content pre-processing step can be surprisingly difficult as the following example illustrates.

#DIY Example with Next.js + Markdown

That's already a lot code for a simple use case - and it's just the tip of the iceberg. To achieve a more reliable setup with a decent developer experience, you’d have to also take care of the following:

• Write

  markdown processing logic, including working with content-processing libraries and their plugins. This is a lot of base-level logic and adds a number of dependencies to your project.

• Implement

  content validation to make sure your content matches the structure expected by your application.

• Cache processed content data to avoid unnecessary work. But

  caching is hard and

  Not caching degrades the developer experience and build performance.

• Incrementally regenerate only the content you changed to optimize rebuild/reload performance.

• Account for rich and complex

  content relations, so that objects can live as individual content files but be embedded as necessary when used as data.

• Most frameworks (e.g Next.js) don't support

  content live-reload. Building this yourself is usually very complicated.

• If you want to work with

  TypeScript and have strongly-typed data, you must write those types manually and hope that the content data matches your types.

Doing all of this is an insane amount of work - and you really shouldn't have to build this yourself.

#Introducing Contentlayer

#How Contentlayer Works

1. First you need to tell Contentlayer where your content lives and which format and structure it has. There are different kinds of content sources - here we're using local Markdown files.

2. Run Contentlayer to transform the content into data. This can be done independently, or by hooking into framework server/build processes.

3. Use

   import to work with your content, just as you would with any other data or code in your application.

#Playground: Try it Yourself

To get a better feeling for how Contentlayer works and how to use it, it's best to actually use it. We've included a interactive playground with a real Next.js + Contentlayer project below. (Currently works best in Chrome on Desktop).

• The content is generated into a .contentlayer/generated directory that includes JSON content caches, exported collections of data, and automatically-generated types.
• The pages/posts/[[...slug]].tsx page brings in the content directly, manipulates it as needed, and passes it onto the page component.

#Benefits of Contentlayer

Contentlayer aims to provide a great developer experience (DX) through the following features:

• Content just works: Gone are the days of writing low-level content-processing logic. Instead, you set the rules and the content

  just works.

• TypeScript Support: Auto-generated TypeScript type definitions every document type.

• Content validation: Content is validated automatically with helpful error messages.

• Caching: Content builds are cached and incrementally regenerated - doing only the minimal amount of work necessary when changing your content.

• Live reload: The browser will automatically reload after changing content for those frameworks that support live reloading.

• Flexible content modeling: Contentlayer allows you to structure your content in a flexible and powerful way.

#Build Performance Comparison: Contentlayer vs DIY and Gatsby

#The Future of Content(layer)

• Add support for more content sources (e.g. Contentful, Notion, ...) and even supporting multiple content sources in a single project
• Providing seamless integrations for more site frameworks (such as Vite, Remix, Astro, ...)
• Validate and evolve the core abstractions of Contentlayer to avoid breaking changes after the 1.0 release

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#Join the Contentlayer Community

You're invited to become part of the Contentlayer community by ...

• Following the tutorial and using Contentlayer into your project.
• Looking through examples and other open-source projects created with Contentlayer.
• Joining our welcoming Discord community.
• Reporting issues in the GitHub repository - Please also consider starring the repo 🌟

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#Thank You 💜

• Everyone already using Contentlayer for providing early feedback shaping the project
• All contributors for reporting and investigating issues
• Stackbit for working together to bring this project to life
• Sean Davis and Lukas Wiesehan for helping to launch Contentlayer's new website and documentation

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