I’ve really been loving Netlify’s entire platform ever since I finally dove into it earlier this year when I rebuilt this site. Since this site went live in March, I’ve also started using Netlify for some work-related projects. My work projects require something a little more involved than just a personal blog needs to be. To build these sites, I need to make connections between different data sources, which doesn’t seem possible with a standard (but still awesome) static site generator like Eleventy.

Well, as it turns out, exactly what I need already exists. Jozef Maxted has written about using Gridsome and Netlify CMS to make connections between collections, which results in an extremely powerful GraphQL API. The limitation here is that this API is for Gridsome’s use only — it doesn’t handle anything except the site I’m building. But that’s actually just what I need. I don’t need a public API for a small static site, but just having it enables some very powerful functionality.