keystone-with-react-engine

KeystoneJS CMS with React Engine as rendering engine, so we can render backend .jsx templates

KeystoneJS

I've used the 'yo keystone' command, to create a default KeystoneJS project, rewrote it to JSX templates and added React Engine as the view engine.

React

Webpack creates a bundle that can mount from the backend rendered html, including props. (thanks to React Engine boot)

Result

now you can write serverside pages with serverside data in JSX templating (bye bye Jade or Handlebars) and simultaniously write the user interaction in those files. onClick will work after mounting the frontend.

Possible extensions

• React Engine supports React Router, if you like to not define your routes in express.
• We can add hotloading at the express routes.

What I am not aiming at

This setup renders one page and allows interactions. It does not render a full SPA. If you will navigate to a next page in JS, you will not have your data prepared. I am not aiming at fixing that. This setup aims to give a better DX in creating a paged CMS-driven website.

Known bugs

• the canAccessKeystone virtual doesn't work from props. Probably since the props is a JSON copy from the model. I've directly requested it in the middleware now to make it available.