When architecting a professional Gatsby website, you need to choose a number of systems: build & hosting provider, headless CMS, component library, e-commerce, analytics, auth, search, forms, and so on.
In addition, your team probably has a number of workflows involving multiple systems. Setting up content preview involves your CMS, Gatsby, and your hosting provider. Creating CMS-driven landing pages involves your CMS, your React components, and Gatsby.
Architecture = Systems + Workflows
The interaction of systems and workflows is an architecture. Typically, a team lead, or tech lead on a Gatsby project is responsible for the architecture.
Choosing Systems, Optimizing Workflows
Systems and workflows in your architecture can be complex. We’ve written blog posts and docs with best practices for many of them.
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How CMS Preview Fits Into Your Content Workflows (blog post)
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CMS-driven landing pages: A Content Marketer’s Paradise (blog post)
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Custom fields and product variants: Product Experience Management with Gatsby (blog post)
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Modern Analytics (doc)
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Common Website Features (doc section)
Making Architecture Decisions Incrementally
Architectures don’t need to be finalized before the project starts. Sometimes, teams can build projects faster by parallelizing development and architecture.
For example, one team had a senior developer work out the full architecture while the junior developer built components. Another team started by building components as they figured out their CMS and hosting providers.
