Streamlining the Component Creation Process

Hey, Alex from Prismic here, and I'm going to talk to you today about Slice Machine, our new development workflow that lets you create components quickly and gives your editors the power to build the pages that they need.

So what is Slice Machine? Well, a Prismic slice is essentially a repeatable, reusable section of your site that's wired up to the Prismic CMS, and Slice Machine is a development environment that makes creating slices a breeze.

So in this demo lightning talk, we are going to be creating a slice with Slice Machine. We are going to be pushing that slice to Prismic. We're going to be filling in content in that slice, and then we're going to be pushing that slice out to production to update our website.

So let's waste no more time, let's actually start by adding a slice to our existing Next.js website built out with Slice Machine. So as you can see here, I have this restaurant site, has a menu and a few other sections here. So let's check out the Figma file that this is based on. And as you can see, we've created slices from each of these parts. Each of these are slices here, and this is the slice that we're going to be adding today.

So it is a map slice that just basically shows the location of the place, the address and a couple other bits with an image and a heading. So let's go ahead, let's waste no time, let's jump into our terminal and create this slice. I'm going to run prismic sm create slice, just like that. And it's going to ask me where I would like this slice. And I say in my slices folder, and I call it location map, just like that. Great.

So now that we've created that slice, let's take a look at what we've just made with running that command. So here in location map, we have four files. index.js is a react component. Here we have a storybook story that's built for us already. Here in the mocs, we have some mock data that will fill in our story. And in the model, this shows the data structure. We'll come back to these in a second and see what changes once we edit them in the slice machine UI.

So I'm going to start up Slice Machine UI by running Prismic, SM, and then develop. And then this is going to start a local development server and kick off the slice machine UI. So let's head back over here. And right here, we see location map is next to all our other components. You might recognize these from our website. So let's go ahead in. Let's get rid of what it ships with by default and create this totally from scratch. So I'm looking at figma. I'm seeing that we've got pretty much four different types that we need to build out here. We have this heading, let's start with that. So I'm going to add a rich text field and call this heading. And I'm going to go in and I'm going to unselect all and make this just an H2, call it heading, just like that.

And I'm going to click Save. Next, we have this address. I'm going to hard code location, so we're going for address. I'm going to do a rich text field address just like that. Hit Enter and add a label here, just like that. And then we're going to grab this image. So we have all these different types to choose from. I'm going to grab an image and label image. Just like that. Cool. And then we need a geolocation because we have a map type here. So GeoPoint is going to allow us to do that. So I'm going to get location. That's what I'm going to call that. I'm going to come in here, give this a label. And for the mock config, I'm going to choose Prismic Headquarters. Just there. And now I save this model to file system and let's go check out what this looks like over here in our file system.

So we see that this was all added right away. Our data has updated. The shape of this data has changed. So now we can start to build out our component now that we've defined the shape so quick already. So heading over here to slices, I'm going to copy or I'm going to show code snippets that I can copy easily into my component. Click copy code on this heading and go over to my react component. Wipe out what's in here and I'm going to drop that in there. That's my heading. Here is my address and I'll style these in a minute. I'm going to grab my image, copy code, see I'm pasting in that image. And then here for my location, I'm just going to paste that in and that is actually an object that has latitude and longitude on it. I'm going to show the latitude and let's check it out in storybook.

I got storybook running. It's already connected in. Let's check out our location map and boom, just like that. We have our title, our address, our image and our latitude. So all just default all mock so we can improve over time. But right now this is looking good.

So now I'm going to really quickly style this up a little bit. Let's see what we can do. All right, so we've skipped ahead to the styling. I've added some classes. I've also brought in this map component that I made that's expecting this location object. And I also hard coded in this location text and we just did some restructuring and styling. And now our component is looking much, much better looking just like that.

And so we are able to now take a snapshot that can be used for our editor. So we'll take a snapshot just like this. And so our editors can use that in Prismic. And there we have our snapshot looking great. Now we can go ahead and push our slice to Prismic so that we can use that in the CMS. And then I'm also going to push my code that we made with Slice Machine up to GitHub. So that Vercel can rebuild my next JS app. I'm going to say add location map slice, git push. And so now as that rebuilds, I'm going to head to my Prismic repository and I'm going to go into my custom types and add this new slice as an option for my editors to use.

So we see here in shared slices, these are the other slices that they've been able to use. And now we have our new location map with that snapshot. We can add that to our custom types and hit save. And so now our editors know exactly what they're grabbing when they come in to edit the homepage. So going into home and I can add this new slice anywhere between the other slices, I'm going to come all the way to the bottom now, because that's where this one's going. And I'm going to scroll over and there's our location map right there. So let's fill it in with some content. I've got a title here.

So great story start with a great dinner. And we've got this address. I've got an image already uploaded that I can choose. And I have a latitude and longitude pasted here that we are going to use. Boom, right there. Now I'm going to hit save. And what I can do is Prismic has a great preview feature. So I could click production, but for the sake of this, we're going to skip ahead to publishing, but I could test it first and make sure that it's exactly how I want it to look. I can either publish it now or later. I'm going to publish it now, hitting publish and boom, just like that. It's going to trigger a rebuild and we're going to see what it looks like when we're done. So once we click publish, the webhook makes versell rebuild our page and here at the bottom, nice, looking great. There's our components.