Anyone got much experience with these, lessons learnt, or what to avoid?
We used to use WordPress at work, but since our developer handed in his notice we’ve been reevaluating this and looking to use our JS team instead.
Been looking at Contentful, with Gatsby & then deploying out to Netlify.
Atm I create something similar in PHP but with a slightly shifted scope. At first it's only a package and not an app, so it works in conjunction with a normal Laravel/Lumen app and only adds features but doesn't limit to.
It's also not made for/thought as a static site generator which only deploys the public folder but more as a static generator on runtime. So the staticness is done by webserver but has normal PHP routing as fallback. So you can still do post requests, run cronjobs or whatever.
This was my biggest problem with JAMstack - that it doesn't work nice with non static routing. The solution in JAMstack would be to create lambda functions. So be sure that you don't need a server runtime or be sure to get used to lambda functions.
Netlify actually allows you to rewite URLs from a backend, so you can have your backend separate and host the frontend on Netlify.
www.netlify.com
I've been working a lot with Netlify lately when building Sitesauce, so feel free to ask me anything :D
I've been using Hugo + Netlify for my personal website (shameless plug) and it's been working flawlessly. I really like the speed of Hugo and the convenience of deploying using git.
I'll be honest though, Hugo's template syntax (from Go) is awful, I absolutely hate it. I'll probably go back to using Jekyll as I find it so much more elegant. Unfortuately, Jekyll suffers from the stack it's built upon: Ruby. Maintaining a ruby stack on a computer is almost impossible, and my current build is so broken I don't even know if I'll ever be capable of running it again without formatting my hard drive. Hugo is fast, but it also runs on a single binary, which is amazing.
That being said, the main problem with static sites is interactivity. You can use Netlify's built-in authentication and form handling systems, but they can be a bit expensive. I personally use a fork of Staticman to handle my blog's comments and it's amazing.
The other thing to consider is content management. For this, the two main solutions are NetlifyCMS and Forestry. Off the two, I think I prefer the first one, but I had one major problem with both: they don't seem to support multilingual content, which is a shame.
So, JAMstack is amazing. Done right, it can get absolutely outstanding results. But you have to consider if it fits your project.
Another thing to consider if you want to ditch Wordpress (and you're right to do so, Wordpress is such a burden to work with): flat-file CMS, like Grav or Kirby.