GraphCMS is a great tool for anyone who uses Gatsby and wants to save developers time
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
GraphCMS is a way for us to allow non-engineers at our company to create content for our marketing website. Once the engineers define the data model within GraphCMS, other employees at our company can easily add the content through their UI, and once published, our build system automatically rebuilds the website with the new content. This allows us to make sure the content is valid and won't break the website, but doesn't force engineers to make small copy/image adjustments on the website.
Pros
- GraphCMS is easy to work with from the "non-engineer" side of things.
- GraphCMS is very flexible on what data models we can create and how those models are formed.
- GraphCMS uses Graph API, which is easy to write (compared to older API patterns).
Cons
- GraphCMS is very expensive at the enterprise level.
- GraphCMS requires deep knowledge of the system and requires lots of time to be efficient with it (especially around creating specific data patterns/relationships).
- Multiple times a day, the system will give us errors when attempting to save something but the errors are unclear as to what went wrong (can be irritating).
Likelihood to Recommend
I would recommend GraphCMS to anyone who is also using Gatsby to build their website. If not, I would recommend them to consider GraphCMS but also consider other options. GraphCMS is a tool in which you are responsible to make the most out of it, but sometimes this requires more time and knowledge than a normal engineer may be able to handle. But with more time and attention, the reward of off-lifting content creation from the developers is a huge time saver in the long run.
