Grow-Blog is a modern, CMS-driven blog platform built with Next.js App Router and Contentful. It focuses on resilience, performance, and clean component architecture, while keeping the UI minimal and developer-friendly.

The project evolved from a static prototype into a fully dynamic blog powered by a headless CMS, with strong error handling and graceful UI fallbacks.

- Headless CMS (Contentful)
    - Content is fetched dynamically from Contentful — no local markdown files.

- Next.js App Router
    - Server Components, async pages, and optimized data fetching.

- Resilient UI Architecture
    - Pages don’t crash when content is missing:

- Component-level error handling
    - Graceful fallbacks (NotFoundComponent, internal guards)

- Performance-Focused
    - Server-side rendering
    - Reduced redundant fetching (props passed instead of refetching)
    - Optimized images (next/image)

• Node.js ≥ 22 recommended
• A Contentful Space with:
  • Blog post content model
  • Access token

This project requires Contentful credentials. Create a .env.local file:

SPACE_ID=your_contentful_space_id
ACCESS_TOKEN=your_contentful_delivery_token

⚠️ Important

• Do NOT prefix these with NEXT_PUBLIC_
• These are server-only secrets
• Never commit .env.local

npm run dev

App runs at: http://localhost:3000

Grow-Blog started as a local, file-based blog prototype, where posts were read from Markdown files at build time. This repository represents Grow-Blog v2, a major architectural evolution.

What Changed

• Real CMS workflow (non-dev content editing)
• No rebuild required for content update
• Better security
• Cleaner separation of concerns
• Pages fetch data
• Components render data
• Components fail gracefully