nextjs-blog-theme

A customizable blog starter using:

• Next.js v15 (Pages Router)
• Tailwind v4.x
• Built-in MDX support
• Includes modern design with dark & light themes

Take a gander at the demo.

Click here to watch the template walkthrough!

Table of Contents:

• Getting Started
  • Setting Up Locally
  • Using the Wizard
• Configuring the Blog
• Adding New Posts
• Testing
  • Included Default Testing
  • Removing Renovate

Getting Started

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You can get started with this project in two ways: locally or using the setup wizard.

Setting Up Locally

If you’re doing it locally, start with clicking the use this template button on GitHub. This will create a new repository with this template’s files on your GitHub account. Once that is done, clone your new repository and navigate to it in your terminal.

From there, you can install the project’s dependencies by running:

yarn install

Finally, you can run your project locally with:

yarn run dev

Open your browser and visit http://localhost:3000, your project should be running!

Using the Setup Wizard

Through the setup wizard, you can create your blog in a few clicks and deploy to Netlify.

Configuring the blog

The config is based on environment variables to make it easy to integrate with any Jamstack platform, like Netlify.

Here are the variables you can edit:

Variable	Description	Options
BLOG_NAME	the name of your blog, displayed below the avatar
BLOG_TITLE	the main header (h1) on the home page
BLOG_FOOTER_TEXT	the text in the footer
BLOG_THEME	the theme to pass to Tailwind	default
BLOG_FONT_HEADINGS	the font-family for all HTML headings, from h1 to h6	sans-serif (default), serif, monospace
BLOG_FONT_BODY	the font-family for all other HTML elements	sans-serif (default), serif, monospace

All of the env variables can be configured through the Wizard or through setting the project’s environment variables. You can do this in your Netlify dashaboard (Site settings/Build & deploy/Environment/Environment variables).

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3611928/153997545-6dcdeef0-e570-49e7-93d6-ce0d393d16c9.mp4

[alt: video walkthrough of editing env vars]

If setting an environment variable isn’t your cup of tea, the defaults can be changed in utils/global-data.js. You can also remove the variables and hard code blog information where these variables are used in the code base.

• BLOG_THEME, BLOG_FONT_HEADINGS, & BLOG_FONT_BODY are used in utils/theme-utils.js
• BLOG_NAME, BLOG_TITLE, BLOG_FOOTER_TEXT are used in pages/index.js & pages/posts/[slug].js through the globalData object.

Adding new posts

All posts are stored in /posts directory. To make a new post, create a new file with the .mdx extension.

Since the posts are written in MDX format you can pass props and components. That means you can use React components inside your posts to make them more interactive. Learn more about how to do so in the MDX docs on content.

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3611928/152727802-102ec296-41c8-446d-93ed-922d11187073.mp4

[alt: video walkthrough of adding a new blog post]

Testing

Included Default Testing

We’ve included some tooling that helps us maintain these templates. This template currently uses:

• Renovate - to regularly update our dependencies

If your team is not interested in this tooling, you can remove them with ease!

Removing Renovate

In order to keep our project up-to-date with dependencies we use a tool called Renovate. If you’re not interested in this tooling, delete the renovate.json file and commit that onto your main branch.

Support

If you get stuck along the way, get help in our support forums.