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Use Notion as a database for your Next.JS Blog

Martin PAUCOT on May 13, 2023

Notion is an extremely powerful tool to manage your content by creating a database you can even add properties to pages: publication date, tags, et...
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Hasanul Haque Banna

The question how can I decode from html/render? Because for doing SEO it is mandatory to implement where to put necessary content so how can I get according to SEO needs?

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Martin PAUCOT

Hey! I do not entirely understand your needs. But when fetching the page fetchPageBySlug(params.slug) it returns the page properties aswell.

You can use it inside generateMetadata to use the page here is how I do it on my blog (with dev.to articles).

You can aswell use generateStaticParams to statically generate all your blog pages at build time.

The result: martin-paucot.fr

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Hasanul Haque Banna • Edited

plugin issue
I am getting this error;

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Martin PAUCOT

If I remember well the plugin expect a configuration, even empty. So hljsPlugin({})

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Hasanul Haque Banna

for metadata instances there has, image property as well how can I get that using notion?

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Martin PAUCOT

When fetching a page, you would have the properties as well.
developers.notion.com/reference/re...

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Alvaro

I have also used it as an MVP for an API, i would recommend to put things behind a lambda or service to have a contract layer and not be tide to the query or response model from Notion.

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Martin PAUCOT • Edited

The model sent to the Notion API is really complex for no reason (in my opinion).

This is why I am working on NotionX! A library that makes working with Notion extremely easy.

Feel free to follow the project and my Twitter to know when it gets published!

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David Yarzebinski

Would love to help with this if there's a possibility of collaboration!

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Javi Aguilar

I looked at the code of NotionX and looks much cleaner than the official SDK. Do you have plans to release it on npm to start trying it? :)

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Huy Tran

@notion-render/hljs-plugin A plugin to fetch website metadata to render bookmarks
need to be modified to:
@notion-render/bookmark-plugin

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MaxBrych

cool stuff

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Eber Alejo

Looks so interesting, great job!

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Ramo Mujagic

Really nice idea.
Tnx for sharing.

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Netsai

This is really awesome!

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Bora Karaca

Interesting... Will try this out tomorrow or later

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Jeremy Smith

Keen to try this tomorrow!!

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jonmccon

This is really awesome! I've pulled content with the notion api but it's quite tedious. Does your work support metadata or database views? Great work, thank you!

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Martin PAUCOT

Hey! Thanks for the feedback! I am actually working on an improved fully typed Notion Client, currently it only supports fetching but in a near future the idea is to be able to use it like a library github.com/kerwanp/notionx.

If you talk about external website metadata like the Bookmark block, the Bookmark plugin will fetch them from the targeted website to render the block.

I never had to query database views before but it will be definitely implemented in the future library I'm working on.

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Hector Sosa • Edited

This is a pretty cool concept! I experimented with it in the past too! Framing some of these screenshots would've been chef's kiss! @martinp I've built a simple OSS tool for creating engaging screenshots with ease. Check it out and let me know what you think! Cheers!

github.com/ekqt/screenshot

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Tilak Khatri

I am using app route of nextjs13 approute , this below api call showing me cors error how to solve it.

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And calling it here.

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Hoping for solving idea :)

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Nguyễn Thế Sơn • Edited

Hi Martin,

I used it in my React application, although i have block, the htmlTemp is still an empty string ("")

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Here is my code:

                const block = await getBlogBlock(id);
                const renderer = new NotionRenderer({
                    client: notion,
                });
                renderer.use(hljsPlugin());
                renderer.use(bookmarkPlugin());

                const htmlTemp = await renderer.render(block);
                setHtml(htmlTemp);
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

The block looks like this when i debug:

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Could you please provide some guidance on how to fix this or point me in the right direction? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance!

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Martin PAUCOT

Hi! The render functions uses rest parameters. Replacing renderer.render(block) by renderer.render(...block) should resolve your issue! (and you can plurialize block at the same occasion).

Basically, a page content contains a list of blocks (paragraphs, bookmarks, quotes, etc). This is why your getBlogBlock function returns an array

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Alwaisy al-waisy

what is their geneorus limiT. Airtable can also do the same.

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Martin PAUCOT

Airtable is cool but Notion is mostly use by marketing and sales team.
It makes way easier for anyone to write content.

And in my case, sometimes when I have an idea I simply open the Notion App and start writing content and set the status of my page to "Draft".

And when it is ready to be published, I just drag the page within my Kanban view to "Published" and tada it appears on the website!

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Alwaisy al-waisy

so simple. How about the limits. 1000 blcoks in free notion.

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Martin PAUCOT

I have no problems of paying the tools I use daily, but if in your case using Airtable makes more sense, go for it!

If you are intersted, I also wrote an article on how to directly fetch your DEV.to posts for your blog Build a Blog using Next.JS and DEV.to

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Kb

Hello, i have a question about showing the notion pages as a webpage in your blogpost it mentions the path blog/[slug] so the url would be /blog/my-first-post...

i can get the page to show but not any of the content...

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snow bell

How to resolve cors policy

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Martin PAUCOT

Hi ! As shown in the error your database ID is not defined. With a correct one it should work well

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Akilesh

I am working on Notion to Blog lamento for those doesn't want to code

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Zenobius Jiricek

Use content layer instead

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Martin PAUCOT

Hey Zenobius! I am the author of the Notion Contentlayer implementation 😉
github.com/kerwanp/contentlayer-so...

Contentlayer is great when working on a Static Website but it means re-building if you want latest up to date data.

This is why I am working on NotionX, a Notion Client with super powers that is usable like an ORM.