notion-to-md VS contentlayer

This is very cool! I recently started managing my Astro site content with Notion as a CMS, thanks to `notion-to-md` [1] and `@notionhq/client` [2] but media management is a hassle.

I had been planning to re-host Notion media files to Cloudflare R2 and rewrite content, but it might just be simpler to use Pages CMS due to built-in R2 support.

But also, I like using Notion apps on the go. Hmm.

[1] https://github.com/souvikinator/notion-to-md

I’ve never used it, but there’s a Notion to Markdown converter on GitHub: https://github.com/souvikinator/notion-to-md

Notion works with content blocks. Each paragraph and each formatted section is a block on its own. Fetching that from Notion gets me a load of nested objects that are cumbersome to work with. I'm using NotionToMarkdown to take care of that. This will give me a markdown string from a Notion page that's easy to work with. Beware it’s just a markdown string, though. Using it in a template will output the unrendered string. But if we put that into a markdown file, from which eleventy will generate pages, it will also render the markdown string to HTML.

One can add custom parsing logic for specific blocks. More details here

Thanks to everyone for using notion-to-md and actively contributing and reporting issues. It has now 200+ stars on GitHub and 1000+ weekly downloads on NPM.

Haven’t done that myself, but I do know there’s a Notion to markdown converter that seems like it might be worth checking out.

Github: https://github.com/souvikinator/notion-to-md

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.