Contentful Marketing Starter Template

A Marketing Starter Template powered by Next.js & Contentful, pre-designed with optimized & adjustable pages, components, and data management.

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What is Contentful?

Contentful provides content infrastructure for digital teams to power websites, apps, and devices. Unlike a CMS, Contentful was built to integrate with the modern software stack. It offers a central hub for structured content, powerful management, and delivery APIs, and a customizable web app that enables developers and content creators to ship their products faster.

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DISCLAIMER ⚠️

The Starter Templates experience is currently only available to new users.

To benefit from this experience, please follow this link to create a new account and select the template to install: https://www.contentful.com/starter-templates/marketing-website/sign-up/?action=create_starter_template.

Alternatively, to immediately start the auto installation of this template after creating a new account, please follow this link: https://www.contentful.com/starter-templates/marketing-website/sign-up/?action=create_starter_template&template_name=marketing.

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Begin your journey with Contentful and the Marketing Starter Template

Follow this guide to understand the relationship between Contentful and the Starter Template source code through guided steps:

• Entry editing, and updates preview in the Starter Template application (online/locally)
• Content type editing in the Contentful web app, as well as in the Starter Template's code

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Features

• Composable content through powerful & flexible content modeling.
• Localization ready.
• SEO ready.
• Server-side rendering with Next.js¹.
• Optimized data management with React Query².
• Generation of GraphQL³ typed code (schema, types, and React Query hooks), in sync with the content types through graphql-codegen⁴.
• Enhanced Developer Experience with TypeScript⁵.

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Getting started

To get started, read the following guidelines.

• Environment variables
• Dependencies
• Development
• Contentful API & GraphQL
• Contentful Components
• Deployment

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Environment variables

In order to authenticate the requests to the Contentful APIs, the following values are necessary:

• Your space ID: https://www.contentful.com/help/find-space-id/
• Contentful Delivery API token: https://www.contentful.com/developers/docs/references/content-delivery-api/
• Contentful Preview API token: https://www.contentful.com/developers/docs/references/content-preview-api/

Rename the .env.example file to .env and add the necessary values.

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Dependencies

To install the necessary dependencies, run:

yarn

Run the Starter Template in development mode

yarn dev

The Starter Template should be up and running on http://localhost:3000.

All necessary dependencies are installed under node_modules and any necessary tools can be accessed via npm scripts.

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Development

Node

It is recommended to use the Node version listed in the .nvmrc file, we recommend using nvm to easily switch between Node versions.

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Husky & git hooks

This repository makes use of Husky to enforce commit hooks.

The config for both the pre-commit and pre-push hooks can be found in the .husky folder, located in the root of the project.

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Pre-commit

Before allowing a commit, we require a successful result from the TypeScript compiler (tsc) and our lint-staged script will be run.

This ensures all ESLint and Prettier rules are enforced on the files that are staged to be committed.

The tsc command is run separately from the lint-staged step because we require the Typescript compiler to sample all files.

This is important to ensure that no deviating types were introduced by the codegen for example.

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Pre-push

The same two tasks are run for pre-push and for pre-commit.

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Overriding the Husky git hooks

In case of wanting to bypass the pre-commit or pre-push hooks, pass a --noVerify flag to your Git commands.

⚠️ Make sure you only use this if you know why you're using it. ⚠️

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Contentful API & GraphQL

This project makes use of Contentful's GraphQL API.

API calls made to the Contentful GraphQL endpoint are made through React Query useQuery hooks.

The hooks are generated from the .graphql files collocated within the components, the following happens:

1. [folderName]/[fileName].graphql file, containing a query, is detected by the codegen
2. [folderName]/__generated/[fileName].generated.ts is generated
3. Within the generated file, a new hook is generated with the following pattern: use[fileName]
4. The hook can now be imported and used within the .ts(x) files in the component folder

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GraphQL & code generation

We use graphql-codegen to generate a type-safe API client, utilizing React Query as the "client".

The data for the hooks is pre-fetched on the server-side.

For more information on how this data is hydrated please read the official documentation.

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Commands

In order to (re-)generate the GraphQL schema, types and hooks, please use either of the following commands:

• yarn graphql-codegen:generate generates a schema, types and code to fetch data from the Contentful APIs
• yarn graphql-codegen:watch similar to the generate command, but it runs as a watch task which will rerun the steps when changes are made in the .graphql files

The first steps of the codegen generate files that contain the GraphQL schema and matching TypeScript types. They're generated to the src/lib/__generated folder and ought to be committed once altered/added to the repository.

Additionally, the codegen watches .graphql files in our src folder, if it runs successfully it generates a __generated folder collocated in the folder where the .graphql file was found.

One exception to this rule is the src/lib/fragments folder which contains shared GraphQL Fragments that are used in several other queries/fragments.

The TS types for these files are generated in the same location, in a __generated folder and like the other files ought to be committed.

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Configuration

The configuration for the codegen can be found in codegen.ts, located in the root of the project.

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Contentful Components

The term Contentful Components (ctf-components for short) is used for React components that have an equivalent Contentful content type.

E.g. all React components needed for rendering the content-type HeroBanner can be found in the folder src/features/ctf-components/ctf-hero-banner.

Usually a ctf-component is composed of 3 files:

• ctf-[contentypeName].graphql: holding the query strings needed for the GraphQL request to fetch the components data.
• ctf-[contentypeName]-gql.tsx: React component which executes the GraphQL query and passes the result to a component for rendering.
• ctf-[contentypeName].tsx: the React component which is actually rendering the content type.

Optionally, a folder with TypeScript interfaces which were generated by GraphQL codegen can also be included:

• /__generated/: (see GraphQL & code generation).

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Component Resolver and content type mapping

There is a component-resolver (./src/components/component-resolver.tsx) React component, which is used to pick the right React component for rendering a content-type.

It requires as properties the content type id, its __typename (used by live preview), and optionally the content.

The component-resolver then uses a key map to find the right React component (./src/mappings.ts), where the key is the content type name and the value is the React component.

It will check the map componentMap first, and if the content type could be resolved it is assumed all content is available. The content is then passed to the React component.

If the content type could not be resolved, componentGqlMap will be used for resolving. If the React component is found the content type id and __typename will be passed, which is used by the component to fetch its data.

According to this pattern, all ctf-components suffixed with -gql should be added to componentGqlMap and all without a suffix should be added to componentMap.

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Creating new Contentful Components

Creating new ctf-components involve the following steps:

• Create a folder for the component files (./src/ctf-components/ctf-[contentTypeName])
• Create the file for the GraphQL query strings (./src/ctf-components/ctf-[contentTypeName].graphql)
• Optionally, generate TypeScript interfaces for the GraphQL result by calling yarn graphql-codegen:generate ( see GraphQL & code generation).
• Create the React components for rendering (./src/ctf-components/ctf-[contentTypeName]-gql.tsx and ./src/ctf-components/ctf-[contentTypeName].tsx).
• Add the component to the componentGqlMap in ./src/mappings.ts.

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Deployment

The Starter Template can be deployed to your hosting provider of choice.

We offer integrations with Vercel and Netlify to speed up the process by clicking one of the deploy buttons below. The GitHub repository and the necessary environment variables keys are pre-configured in the hosting provider space.

Vercel	Netlify
Environment variables docs	Environment variables docs

Make sure to add the necessary environment variables values to the hosting provider environment variables.

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Content preview & live preview

Once you have the Starter Template deployed on your hosting provider, you can update the Content preview URL in your space settings.

You can follow our guide to learn how to do so: https://www.contentful.com/help/setup-content-preview.

For the live preview the basic field tagging for the inspector mode and live updates are already implemented. For custom components, you can find the instructions at our guide.

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Support

If you have a problem with this Starter Template, post a message in our Contentful Community Slack.

Can't find your answer there? You can file a feedback issue through this template.

If you have other problems with Contentful not related to the Starter Template, you can contact the Customer Support.

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Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

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License

MIT License, see LICENSE.

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Footnotes

1. Next.js docs ↩

2. React Query ↩

3. GraphQL docs ↩

4. graphql-codegen ↩

5. TypeScript ↩