I am starting to explore DatoCMS for a new project & I have gone through some of the docs, I am still a bit overwhelmed with where to begin and how to best set things up. I want to build a fairly simple content-driven site but want to make sure I am using the right structure & best practices from the get-go.
Also, I am planning to include some tutorials on the site, such as a Python tutorial, so I want to organize content models in a way that makes adding and updating those kinds of lessons easy.
Does anyone have advice on the essentials I should focus on first? such as, what is the easiest way to organize models and fields for a clean content workflow?
First, might I suggest you try deploying one of our starter kits? Project starters - Free demo projects - Marketplace With a few clicks, they’ll spin up a demo project for you with example schemas and models, and corresponding frontend (that you can either look at locally or deploy to Netlify or Vercel). That would show you a realistic connection between the CMS and your frontend.
Beyond that, the DatoCMS Academy has some basic overviews, and we also have more detailed video guides about using different parts of the CMS itself.
For something like including Python tutorials (or any other kind of code), you could use Structured Text field in your to mix regular text and code blocks:
You could render that Python code on the frontend using any code formatter/syntax highlighter you like.
By the way, we would not recommend Gatsby at this point… it seems to be mostly abandoned now. If you were starting a new project, probably Astro, Next, Nuxt, etc. would be more modern (and supported) choices.
If you need more specific help, could you please let us know the details of your project, your level of experience, the frontend frameworks you’re considering, etc., and we can try to provide more detailed guidance?
