reactjs - Client side or Server Side - React (App for a customer)

Question

i have a quick question, so i just built 3 websites for customers using React and they're all deployed and working but now one of these customers is asking me how they can update its content, all the website are stored either on one or many JS files after building them with npm run build and configured with webpack, how should i build a website where customers plan to change either texts or add new images? the websites have a couple of map functions to display many pictures or card based on products, so everytime theres a change i have to go through the react files and change them build it again and deploy them which seems pretty static to me even though React is supposed to work with components and make it dynamic, what would be the best approach and/or tools to build a website where a customer can change a .JS file with text in Cpanel file manager, or just add pictures to a directory in Cpanel file manager and have it render automatically, i was thinking that i should make it server side so i can avoid having to re build and re upload everytime that there are changes, bu what would be the best options besides React to make it dynamic, Should i use node, express??

Thank you so much for your time !

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65927141/client-side-or-server-side-react-app-for-a-customer

Answer 1

One of the options could be Contentful API, you can store all of your data there and add permission to your customer to edit the repo. This will make it easier to change the content that you mentioned: "the websites have a couple of map functions to display many pictures or card based on products". So what you will do is simply fetch data from the API and render it on your website, this will allow your Customers to CRUD the content of your website, without your intervention. It is pretty easy to use, you can find out more about it here: https://www.contentful.com/developers/docs/.

Regarding the content of the website itself, e.g pages, texts on pages, and other static stuff that does not depend on actual data, but it's only a part of your code, I think it could be hard to manage without you coding it manually. If there is an exact part of content data that is going to be changed, you could make a new Admin page, where the user will be able to change the content and data on your website, and in this could you will have to add some back-end (node, express, etc). But what you're describing is actually CMS which is really popular nowadays you might want to take a look at some of them:

• https://www.wix.com/
• https://wordpress.com/

But if the Texts that you've mentioned are just a part of models e.g You have a product with something like this:

const product = {
   productName: 'name',
   price: '100',
   image: 'img',
   avialable: false,
}

and clients want to change productName, price, image, avialability then Contentful is pretty sufficient for you. If you will need some help with this Platform you can DM me I will try to help you.