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How to Use Gatsby with Markdown
Markdown provides a simple, fast workflow that can enable teams to collaborate effectively without the overhead of traditional CMSs.
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When Is Markdown a Good Idea?
Markdown is great for:
- Simple page layouts
- Blogs and marketing sites
- Teams who are comfortable with plain text and code editors
- Projects that need to control costs
Markdown is not-so-great for:
- Complex page layouts
- Teams who are more comfortable using WYSIWYG editors
- Workflows with multiple review stages during the publishing process
What Does It Take to Implement Markdown?
For teams made up of developers, Markdown is a commonly used format for writing documentation. If your team uses source control sites like GitHub or Bitbucket, for example, they’re likely using Markdown already.
Over the last few years, using Markdown for websites (the so-called JAMStack) has become more and more popular, thanks in part to applications — like Netlify CMS — that provide a clean editing interface.
Setting up a Gatsby site to use Markdown takes as little as 15 minutes. Because using Markdown only involves creating text files, no additional services or infrastructure are required in projects that implement it. Gatsby also provides a plugin to process Markdown into web-ready content, so no custom code is required to get up and running.
An example of Markdown on the left, processed to web-ready content on the right.
If your team is code savvy, or if controlling cost is a primary goal, Markdown is one of the best ways to manage content in your apps.
Ready to Get Started?
- Get expert help
- Read the Gatsby + Markdown documentation
- See the source code of a Gatsby site using Markdown
- Learn about the JAMstack