"Composable" sites

[KyleAMathews]

As brought up in this discussion

Woah. Just had an idea. What do you think about the idea of "composable" websites? Gatsby is already doing this to some extent as it has fallbacks for most critical files you need but you can override them easily but we could extend that concept further to something like Object.assign(Gatsby, website_base, actual_website).

So in practice how this would work is there'd be a base documentation site hosted on github. When you want a new docs site you'd just set the github url for the base site and then start adding markdown files. Anything else you'd want to modify could be set in the site config file.

[KyleAMathews]

Probably only way to make this work with Webpack (as it doesn't support virtual files) is to copy all the files together in a temp directory and develop/build from there.

[KyleAMathews]

Cool idea... not sure how to do it exactly and also perhaps wouldn't be practical as almost every site will inevitably want to diverge from its "parent" site eventually. Better I think to focus on making awesome starters + reusable smaller modules that can be installed and used in many sites.

[KyleAMathews]

Re-opening as figured out how to do this for realz with #177.

[KyleAMathews]

One thought I've had for the interface here is it could mimic the plugin interface from Webpack. You'd import parent sites or themes or whatever we end up calling them into your gatsby.config.js file and then export an array of these with any optional configuration. Also themes could draw data from your config.toml

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[KyleAMathews]

Closing as super old and there's more recent issues on themes which will cover this.