starter-gatsby-blog VS styled-components

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

CSS-in-JS is a styling technique wherein CSS is composed using JavaScript instead of defined in external files. This method allows CSS to be scoped locally to components rather than globally, reducing the probability of style conflicts. Utilizing JavaScript also enables dynamic styling easily aligned with the component's state or props. Libraries like Styled Components and Emotion are popular choices in the React ecosystem for adopting this method.

In 2023, I had a chat with Max Stoiber, CEO of Stellate, on a podcast to learn about his early success on GitHub. His first open-source project, react-boilerplate/react-boilerplate, gained a whopping 10k stars in just one weekend after appearing on the homepage of Hacker News. This success led Max to drop out of university and create several other popular open-source projects, including styled-components. This library accelerates the process of building styles in React components.

Embracing the styled-components library allows developers to write actual CSS code to style their components. It utilizes tagged template literals to style components, enabling a seamless integration of styles within the component's JavaScript file. This approach eliminates the mapping between components and styles, thus enhancing developer productivity and component reusability.

styled-components: Allows for maintainable styling with CSS-in-JS. Learn more

Over the past few years, I've worked with React apps utilising various CSS-in-JS libraries, starting with styled-components, transitioning through emotion, Theme UI, and finally Stitches. I've also integrated MUI, Mantine, and Chakra in numerous client projects.

There are several alternatives to MUI. shadcn/ui is a modern alternative that is very popular. Ant Design is also a great alternative. Charkra UI can also be used as a UI Framework. Some people suggest just using styled components. Some use Tailwind CSS. Yet, for both styled components and Tailwind CSS, one still writes a lot of CSS. This might not provide the best developer experience compared to using a UI Framework, especially if we aim to avoid designing all the pages on the website.

Website: Styled Components

The project is build using several ready made components available within, Mantine. It’s a fully featured React components library. However some places still use some custom CSS-in-JS so we used some good ol’ styled components.