Comment by dynamite-ready | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dynamite-ready | Hacker News Reader

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I'm quite surprised by the negativity here. If I was commissioned to make a custom blog site for someone, I would probably go down this route, and use a headless CMS to make it easier for others to generate content. But using plain markdown is not a bad choice if you can't be bothered with, or can't afford a server.

With the stack described as I understand it, the front-end flexibility is preferable to what the likes of what WordPress will give you, and the stack will allow a developer to decouple the CMS backend from whatever plans he or she has for the frontend.

I suppose one can complain about React all they like. I'm not the biggest fan of React, but component based rendering has it's advantages, so I can't see the issue with that choice.

The only thing I don't like, is 'JS all the way down'... Not because I hate the language (I think the language is fine, and TypeScript is overrated). But just because I'm still not quite sure what the effect on SEO and accessibility might be, when developers go 'full JS'.

As another user mentioned, Next.js has a 'next build' command that creates a HTML build at build time. But it also provides server-side rendering by default.

Next.js also provides a very useful function: getStaticProps. This function will be called at build time - and will provide your (now static) build with dynamic data! It's pretty cool.

I think with Next you can "build" the website (the HTML for each page is generated like it would be if it was executed in your browser) and then serve the static HTML + JS if needed, which makes for good SEO.

If I was commissioned to make someone a blog site , quite frankly I would just install Wordpress and call it a day.

You'd be missing out, tbh.

Going down the JAM stack route provides a number of opportunities to improve on many of technical aspects common to the development of a CMS backed website.

For a start, you'll miss out on opportunities cheaper hosting with 'serverless' deployment. But I think the chance to decouple the frontend from the backend is valuable enough, fwiw.

Ironically serverless is move expensive. For a dollar month you can get wordpress hosting.

If you build a JAM stack site, many places will host it for free. GitHub most famously.

Relying on free hosting for a commercial enterprise is not smart!

FWIW I just finished building a (very) basic blog using Gatsby (which is based on React) and SEO scores are fine. Accessibility should also be achievable, though I find that failures in that regard are usually due to developers not caring/having deadlines instead of a lack of available tools.

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