starter-gatsby-blog VS gatsby-starter-mate

So, my first port of call was the official GitHub repository where Contentful maintains a starter blog template built using Gatsby, which has push button deployment for Gatsby Cloud. This template is basic but properly formatted with all the necessary features of a functional blog. Things like an index page, formatting for individual posts and key visuals, plus timestamps, authors, and tagging.

Now to be fair to both, if you use the starter-gatsby-blog from Contentful themselves, the new gatsby-starter-contentful-homepage from Gatsby, or the Next.js Contentful example, these do use environment variables. It's just these basic starters that do not.

Ultimately, I think there is too much content being created at the start here. There is, I think, a pretty decent chance you will end scrapping a decent portion of these models and content. Or, you will have to spend a lot of time restructuring/renaming it to meet your project's needs, which is not ideal. On the other hand, the existing contentful/starter-gatsby-blog I think has too little content. Therefore, I think there needs to be a nice middle ground with the quantity of content being generated out of the box.

npx gatsby new . https://github.com/contentful/starter-gatsby-blog

I’d been searching the web for a suitable template, and eventually I found the Mate portfolio starter by software engineer Ema Suriano. This is a beautiful single page site with a customizable and responsive design regardless of whether you access it on a desktop, smartphone, or magic mirror. If you end up using this template yourself, be sure to buy them a coffee.

Due to the ground work done in Ema Suriano's gatsby-starter-mate, after the work done in the previous post only the following are needed: