This month I resigned myself to the eventuality that GPT-3, the astounding AI model that can produce creative fiction well enough to fool humans, will one day replace me as the Gatsby Gazette editor. ?
My only hope is to train GPT-3 myself, then pass off its writing as my own. You know what they say — if you can’t beat ‘em, feed them your data then plagiarize their work. Until then, here are the most exciting updates from Gatsby World, curated by a human…for now.
? New in Gatsby and Gatsby Cloud
All Together Now
We unified our websites, unveiled a new pricing plan, and made our roadmap public. The result: The full capabilities of Gatsby and Gatsby Cloud are now easier to understand, cheaper less expensive to get started with, and easier to plan your own projects around. Read more about our vision in this mega post.
Take a peek at the Gatsby roadmap, and submit your feedback and ideas!
Simplified Method of Creating Pages and Routes
We launched a new file system Route API in private alpha. This powerful and flexible new method will enable you to create client-only routes, a collection of pages based on a model, and fallback pages using files in your /src/pages/ folder. The new API replaces the usage of createPages for route and page creation (without deprecating that method if you need it for an edge case). This means less code to write, and less potential bugs in your project!
The Route API is in its early stages, but if you’d like to give it a try, register here.
Lighthouse Scores and Deploy Previews in Pull Requests
One of the “wow” features Gatsby Cloud users love is the Lighthouse performance and accessibility report on every build. Now we’re publishing that report as a comment in your pull requests, along with a “deploy preview” link. See a live example on a PR for our own website. Now improvements or regressions to performance will be visible to your team as your PR gets reviewed!
GitLab Support now available in Gatsby Cloud
Now you can sign in to Gatsby Cloud with GitLab and add GitLab repositories to your Gatsby Cloud Workspaces. Bitbucket support coming soon!
??? New from the Gatsby Team
Madalyn Parker wrote about overcoming accessibility tooling overwhelm by embracing the paradigm that “Accessibility Testing is like Making Coffee.” Share that article and its illustrations with your team next time you’re at a crossroads about which a11y tools to adopt.
And speaking of accessibility and hot beverages… Amberley Romo launched a11y.coffee, an accessibility resource for web developers. Amberley includes a super helpful list of a11y quick wins you can apply to your projects right now.
Shane Thomas joined the Talking Drupal podcast to discuss Gatsby’s updated integration with Drupal. You can get first hand experience with the stack Shane describes with our Gatsby + Drupal tutorial.
Obinna Ekwuno appeared on Learn with Jason and demoed Gatsby’s new Route API. Skip to 44 minutes in the video to see Obinna walk through a cool new Gatsby feature that will speed up your workflow.
Kyle Mathews spoke about Gatsby Recipes and took audience questions at the MMT Meetup.
? New from the Gatsby Community
Recently Meetup, the 18-year-old community site, adopted Gatsby! Meetup’s VP of Engineering, Brian Guthrie, walked through their architecture choices on a webinar.
Thank you Dan Kirkham for not just adding support for cache refresh via GraphiQL but also writing a helpful doc for the new feature.
Thank you to Adam Bohannon from Housecall Pro for updating the Shopify API version in gatsby-source-shopify plugin. Now anyone in the community can query new fields listed in the current Shopify documentation, which the old API didn’t expose access to.
Thank you Zlatko Zlatev of Ralev for identifying and fixing a bug that processed some .js bundles as yaml bundles.
Lastly, thank you Aman Zishan from Blockstack for updating the links in several of our starters to our unified website.
? New from the Gatsby Ecosystem
Four Kitchens, a web development agency, recently launched the Emulsify Design System, and a Gatsby theme that can generate a fully customizable style guide, using MDX and Theme UI. If you need to create design systems with reusable components, give Emulsify a try.
MDX put on their first mini-conference, and it was a blast for everyone involved! Watch all of the MDX conf presentations on Egghead, including a talk on the new MDX v2 syntax delivered by Gatsby’s very own, Laurie Barth.
CraftCMS released a new alpha of their Gatsby source plugin! This will give CraftCMS users better integration with Gatsby Cloud. Try it out, and give the team feedback on their repo.
Sanity launched Presence, making it easy to view and work alongside your teammates, right inside Sanity Studio. The Sanity team says Presence kicks off a new focus on content collaboration.
Netlify celebrated a huge milestone – 1 million developers served – and announced their first ever Headless Commerce Summit.
? Next from Gatsby
We’re also working on enabling you to deploy sites directly from Gatsby Cloud to Azure Blob Storage. Soon you’ll be able to onboard clients who use Azure to Gatsby Cloud too without requiring them to adopt a different asset storage or CDN provider.