January 31, 2023

ButterCMS is great, but...

I watched this video in which Colby Fayock explains how ButterCMS works. I really like the concept (and looks) of ButterCMS.

However… at 5:19 minutes and at 25:33 minutes Colby edited out the wait for the deploy on Vercel. I wrote about deployment delays before. I think it is critical to have instant deploys and so does Kyle Matthews (CTO of Gatsby). If Colby would have deployed to Gatsby Cloud, instead of Vercel, the deploy should have been instant due to Reactive Site Generation. Kyle is pretty clear about it. He says: “Site owners need one second publishes. Whether they’re previewing changes, publishing a typo fix for a news article from a CMS, or there’s real-time pricing or inventory updates on their ecommerce site, it’s critical the change goes live immediately.”

Instant deploys are really a must-have. I would love to see ButterCMS in combination with Kyle’s state of the art deploy process (on Gatsby Cloud).

PS. I could not help but notice that content updates using Gatsby and ButterCMS require a restart of the local server, instead of relying on hot reloading (like Hugo does). That can get old really quickly. I would try to find a solution for restarting the local server before using this workflow.

()  Joost van der Schee