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Jamstacked Issue 24

Front of the front end and back of the front end?

Published: Feb 18, 2021

Your update on all things Jamstack

#24 — February 18, 2021
✦ web version

I really enjoyed reading Brad Frost's post, "front-of-the-front-end and back-of-the-front-end web development." I like the concept, especially having been someone who has intensely disliked the term "full stack" since the beginning. It got me thinking about how Jamstack development fits within this dichotomy.

Obviously, there is a front-of-the-frontend piece (every site needs a layout and design after all), but much of what we talk about as being distinctly Jamstack relates to the back-of-the-frontend - connecting to APIs, creating services, managing the deployment, etc. It's an interesting way to look at specific areas of expertise and dividing the work amongst teams building web apps - Jamstack or not...but of course Jamstack.

Brian Rinaldi

↘︎ What's Good

How to Secure API Routes for Jamstack Sites
Serverless functions such as Netlify Functions aren’t protected from misuse by default as the endpoint URL is exposed. This posts looks at some strategies to add some basic security to these functions.

Carlos Eberhardt

Balancing Flexibility and Productivity in Your CMS
A good look at how to approach balancing structure with flexibility by thinking about content-first versus component-first content modeling when working with a headless CMS.

Sean C Davis

Headless Shopify
Shopify is traditionally used as an out-of-the-box coupled ecommerce solution, but it does offer a Storefront API, which can be used as a headless option. What are the pros and cons of using it?

Nebojsa Radakovic

gatsby-source-wordpress v4
Version 4 of this plugin recently launched and leverages the work Gatsby has done creating the WPGraphQL project which allows it to work well incremental builds, fast builds, and CMS previews.

Gatsby

✂︎ Tools and Resources

❖ Tidbits

Learn To Love Your Jamstack BFF
There’s been some pushback on modern frontend development and Jamstack specifically from folks who see a return to the monolithic backend as a return to simplicity.

Brian Rinaldi

Get Post-deploy Events - Now Available in Netlify Build Plugins
Netlify Build Plugins can now run tasks after assets are deployed for thigs like production perf and acceptance testing or connections with other services.

Jessica Parsons

Integrating Sanity and Hugo with Netlify Plugins
While this guide is Sanity-specific, it does show how you can leverage Netlify Build Plugins with a more traditional static site generator to pull content from a remote source at build time (a feature that has largely been lacking in tools like Hugo).

Sanity.io

Exporting Disqus Comments and Adding Them to Eleventy
Converting existing Disqus comments to JSON and then importing that data on each associated post within Eleventy.

Raymond Camden

Thanks for reading. Catch you next time — Brian