Building a GatsbyJS Theme - Introduction

If you've been following GatsbyJS, than I'm sure you've already heard about the introduction of Gatsby themes.

Why We Need Themes

I've been building tons of sites in Gatsby lately, for both my own projects and clients. Until recently I've been using my own starter that I built to scaffold out a basic design for similar websites. This works fine, until I decide that I want to make a minor change to functionality or design across all of the sites built off of this starter.

Currently the way to do this is to make these changes, then push the same changes to all of my other sites. While this isn't the end of the world, there certainly has to be a better way to do this.

Themes to the Rescue

Gatsby themes claim to make this entire process easier by enabling a single update to a theme, that will be pushed to all sites built using that theme.

You can read more about themes directly on the GatsbyJS.org website here

Disclaimer: I have no experience with Gatsby themes yet.

I figured having no experience with themes, that this would be a great opportunity to document my path for learning about Gatsby themes, and how to build one from the ground up.

What's to Come

I will be posting my continued attempts and (hopefully) progress building a Gatsby theme.

I will link to the next parts in the tutorial as I write them for you to follow along.

Feel free to reach out via the comments, twitter, or email with any questions or requests that you might have for this tutorial!

You can view part one of the tutorial here

This tutorial will be posted on both dev.to as well as my own blog, so feel free to checkout both!