Umbrella Issue: Gatsby Blog Theme 1.6

This issue tracks the work being done for the 1.6 release. This is separate from the 2.0 release.

• Social card images
• Featured images
• Toggle off gatsby-plugin-theme-ui
• Support external URLs for images
• Variable excerpt length
• Update READMEs

[ehowey]

Hey Laurie,

Looking forward to follow this one! Cool to see where themes are headed.

Two thoughts from playing around with the gatsby-theme-blog-core and extending it in some of my own work. I basically just took the core theme and tweaked a bit.

You can see what I did here: https://github.com/ehowey/gatsby-theme-catalyst/blob/master/themes/gatsby-theme-catalyst-blog/gatsby-node.js

• Having a single “featured image” field in frontmatter is limiting. The featured image is often different from what people want shared as the social image. I split this out as two separate image fields, featuredImage and socialImage. Then depending on how the SEO component is setup the featured image could be passed to it or the social image. I noticed you put in fields for the alt tags, great idea. I was just passing the blog post title in as the alt.

• Being able to customize the excerpt length is nice-to-have, I did this via a theme option in gatsby-config, I felt 140 characters was too short for some designs

[laurieontech]

Thanks for the feedback @ehowey! That’s an interesting thought on social vs. featured image. Perhaps it can default to the featured one if you don’t explicitly set a social image? Does that seem reasonable?

In terms of customizing excerpt length that’s certainly something I hadn’t considered. I love it!