hast VS contentlayer

contentlayer uses remark to parse the markdown in an mdast. We can now use remark plugins to modify the mdast. Then rehype comes into play and converts the mdast into a hast. rehype plugins can now modify the hast. Finally the hast is converted into react components.

remark-rehype translates the mdast structure into a Hypertext Abstract Syntax Tree (hast) structure, also composed of unist nodes.

We have to pass hast elements thought. If you want to read more about hast elements, check out this documentation link.

Is it so hard to accept that a tool or app could compile a html document into some intermediate form and then use that to internally construct a DOM representation, maybe out of a cache?

This looks and sounds great...

I'm currently using [contentlayer.dev](https://github.com/contentlayerdev/contentlayer) to manage docs and blog content, mostly .mdx files on urlbox.com.

It works well with next.js but unfortunately is abandonware now.

I also have a few custom remark/rehype plugins.

You're right it is a pain to update articles buried in your repo especially with less technical team members. I already tried out TinaCMS to try and solve the editing issues, but their editor wasn't so nice, and it seemed to implicitly make a commit on every tiny change to any content, so I'm really hoping I could use something like this to edit my already existing content...

Content Management: Contentlayer

For my personal website, I use Next and Contentlayer since I prefer to write my content as markdown files. I then host it using vercel's free tier.

I've seen https://www.contentlayer.dev/ used for similar stuff on open source codebases like taxonomy from shadcn

Contentlayer makes it super easy to grab our mdx blog posts in a type-safe way.

Flowershow uses Contentlayer to turn your Markdown content into data stored in JSON files. By defining document schemas, Contentlayer can generate data that is validated (making it type-safe) and can be imported from anywhere in your Next.js app.

My first reaction was to use MDX and use next/image just as in the example. But that means that we can't use normal markdown images and it turns out that this won't work with contentlayer. This wont work, because Next.js does some magic on the import of the static image. The object which gets returned by the import, contains not only a path to the image, it contains also the width and height, plus a very small version of the image for the blurred placeholder. This magic does not work if the MDX file is loaded with contentlayer, because contentlayer uses its own bundler, which does not know about the import magic for images.

After the installation we have to tell MDX that it should use the plugin. The example below shows a contentlayer config, but it should work with every MDX setup.