When I initially made garden, the idea was that boilerplating a site was easier than writing up its underlying functionality. Boilerplate exposes more control to users -- you can literally rip out and implement whatever you need to. However, the undergirding feature of garden was its ability to help users quickly spin up something like a blog using Next.js and markdown. The vast majority of this functionality has been abstracted into a library I wrote a few months ago called next-mdx-relations. garden now runs on next-mdx-relations and has been updated to Next 12.

minor changes

You can find all of the documentation for next-mdx-relations on github. The biggest two changes are the configuration file and the catch all route.

Configuration can be found at next-mdx-relations.config.js and it's been aliased to @mdx for convenience. In this file, you can set your content directory, generate relations between and within markdown files, and add remark and rehype plugins as needed. You can find a longer discussion in a blog post here.

I've also removed the [path]/[slug] route in favor of a catchall [...slug].js route. This allows for deeper nesting, more granular control over routes, and an overall easier experience when creating multiple routes that rely on next-mdx-relations. You can find documentation for catchall slugs here. One note is that the [tags]/[slug] route remains. This allows us to generate those pages using getPathsByProp outside of the logic of the catchall route.

wrapping up

This update shouldn't cause any breaking changes. The babel config used to jest has been moved to .test/babel.config.js, but otherwise everything should be the same.

Given more time, I'd like to continue updating both garden and next-mdx-relations in tandem, and templating should be next on the agenda.

up next

• upgrade to next-mdx-relations
• templating