Three Facets of Contentlayer

Three Facets of Contentlayer

There are three main uses for Contentlayer, each revolving around the primary purpose of transforming your content into data that can be easily consumed by your code. These pieces are:

1. Transformation Content into Data
2. Structuring Loose Data
3. Defining Data Types

Transformation Content into Data

Regardless of the source of the data or how the data will be used in the code, the primary purpose for Contentlayer is to transform content in to data that your code can use.

This process occurs by reading data from the data source, whether that source is external or a series of local files, and converting it into a format that your code can understand, as importable JavaScript files.

This provides an array of benefits, but perhaps the greatest is that your content is suddenly treated as just more code, making it trivial for frameworks like Next.js to recognize when you've updated content and refresh the DOM almost immediately using hot module reloading (HMR).