Content As Data
Having to repeat things when programming is no fun, and that's why (web) component based development is so useful! As websites start to grow, there comes a point where being able to have access to the content and structure of your site's layout programmatically becomes incredibly useful for generating repetitive HTML.
If you are developing a blog site, like in our Getting Started guide, having to manually list a couple of blog posts by hand isn't so bad.
<ul>
<li><a href="/blog/2024/first-post.md">First Post</li></a>
<li><a href="/blog/2024/second-post.md">Second Post</li></a>
</ul>
But what happens over time, when that list grows to 10, 50, 100+ posts? Imagine maintaining that list each time, over and over again? Or just remembering to update that list each time you publish a new post? Not only that, but wouldn't it also be great to sort, search, filter, and organize those posts to make them easier for users to navigate and find?
To assist with this, Greenwood provides a set of "content as data" capabilities:
- Pages Data - Learn about the data schema available for your content
- Data Client - Utilities for getting your content as data
- Collections - Frontmatter based configuration for grouping related content
- Active Frontmatter - Interpolate your page's frontmatter in your HTML
First thing though, make sure you've set the
activeContentflag totruein your greenwood.config.js.These features works best when used for build time templating combining our prerender and static optimization configurations.