This is a static website generated with Jekyll, feeded with Contentful and hosted on Netlify. This configuration allows to have the benefits of a fast and secure static website with the flexibility of a content management system (CMS).
Table of Contents
The website is coded with Jekyll and the source code (as you should know :-) is available on Github. We choosed to deploy the website on Netlify because it offers some modern features like CDN network, continuous deployment, Git integration and inbound webhooks... Netlify also offers a free plan for Open Source project. Contentful is our API-driven CMS with which we can manage a content independently from the platform where it will be displayed.
With the Git integration of Netlify, every time a new commit is done, the website is rebuild and redployed.
With the inbound webhooks of Netlify, every time a content is add, updated or deleted, the website is rebuild and redployed.
First you should check the Social Wall documentation to install properly this plugin which displays the social content on the home page.
This website works with Jekyll 3.3.1 so check the official documentation to be sure that you have your environment ready to run it. To retrieve the data from Contentful, you need to configure your bash_profile with the environment variables CONTENTFUL_ACCESS_TOKEN and CONTENTFUL_SPACE_ID. Then if you run the command jekyll contentful all the data will be imported from the Contentful API and printed in their respective files in the _data/contentful folder. Check the Jekyll-Contentful-Data-Import doc for more informations about the Contentful data import configuration.
On Netlify you just need to link the Github url with the website. Then set the Branch to deploy as you want. The Build Cmd must be jekyll contentful --rebuild and the Public folder _site/. Do not forget to set the environment variables for the Social Wall plugin and Contenful. Now every time you commit on your project, a new build command is executed and your website is deployed.
To rebuild your website every time a content is add, updated or removed from Contentful, you need to configure a build hooks on Netlify and copy paste its URL to Contentful webhooks settings. In this way every time you save a change on Contenful, that URL is called and the build command is run on Netlify.