Essential Tools for Effective Content Handling in React

React is a popular JavaScript library for web-based and mobile application development. It incorporates code snippets called components that are used to build UIs (user interfaces).

The usability, flexibility, and scalability of React have made it extremely widely used – plus, the React Native framework offers an open-source library, which allows users to develop cross-platform React apps for both Android and iOS.

If you’re looking for a better way to handle your content in React, we’ve got the details of the tools that’ll make your life easier.

Best for Getting Started: Create React App

If you’re new to React, this app is a great place to get started and learn the ropes. You can set up a pipeline, project structure, and developer environment and even add optimization options in minutes with zero configuration. Best of all, once you’ve got the hang of things, you can simply choose to eject from the app and edit the relevant configuration files directly.

One of the many things that the developers who use it love about the Create React App is that it allows them to assess their application’s responsiveness and performance. The tool does so by tracking web vitals-defined metrics and measuring them against the web-vitals library.

Further, the templates available are a great way to fine-tune a project regarding the correct dependencies, and TypeScript can be enabled to make use of static type analysis.

The Create React App effectively simplifies the process of creating a new app and makes the whole endeavor much less time-consuming. React Slingshot and React Boilerplate are other good options for getting up and running with the system.

Best CMS (Content Management System): Sanity

For a one-stop-shop solution that’ll help you manage content more efficiently in React, Sanity is definitely worthy of consideration. Open source and API-based, this solution offers content backend for every mobile OS, marketing and eCommerce tools, and the facility to customize the platform’s editing interface with your own React components.

The concept behind Sanity is viewing content as data, within which system, every piece of content is a data block that can be reused to meet new or changing goals. The result, according to the brains behind the solution and its legions of fans, is the ability to create multi-experience, cohesive customer journeys that exceed expectations.

The Sanity Studio incorporates a flexible editing environment, enabling your team to customize and configure workspaces and create content for any channel, service, or application. It’s designed to be eminently scalable, too, so it can adapt to the changing needs of you or your business.

Best Rich Text Editor: TinyMCE

To up your productivity and help make content handling a breeze, you need a great WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) rich text editor designed for React. This tool will allow you to quickly and easily edit content and even build your own content creation experience with customization options that are nearly endless.

When it comes to options, look for a fast, easy-to-use, and flexible react rich text editor with a fully customizable UI, plenty of plug-ins, is easily expandable, and can be self-hosted or loaded from the cloud – like Tiny MCE. As well as all this, TinyMCE is super easy to install, which can be done simply by adding a few lines of code, and allows developers to maintain full control of the UI, integrations, and configurations.

Other features of this rich text editor include the ability to add a bookmark or anchor button to the toolbar, add a dialogue to the editor that features a map of special Unicode characters, and the automatic resizing of the editor to the content within it.

The compliance features are second to none, too, and can help ensure that the content you manage complies with WCAG standards and is as readable as possible. This is probably why over 1.5 million developers are already using this tool, which is designed to turn complex projects into manageable builds.

Best for Building Reusable App Components: React Cosmos

This clever tool, designed for separating out the front and back end of the app you’re building, can save you time and energy by scanning your React projects for components and then allowing you to render them using any combination of context, props, and state. Plus, React Cosmos lets the user mock-up external dependencies, such as API responses, to see the state of an app in real time.

The ability to identify and fix bugs is made easier with this tool – this is due to the fact that React Cosmos isolates app components into individual units, which makes it much easier to track down the source of an error.

React Cosmos can be deployed on any React or React Native project and aims to offer a low-code, curated authoring experience that’s as flexible as possible. And as a sandbox for developing and testing React UI components in isolation, this tool is pretty hard to beat.

Best for Visualization: React Sight

Use React Sight to visualize the apps you’re developing within the live component hierarchy tree – this tool works well with a wide range of libraries, including react-router, react-fiber, and redux. Plus, it’s great for debugging complex or large projects. Apply filters so that you can see only the elements you want to interrogate, allowing you to focus on the aspects of the app you’ve created.

React Sight incorporates features to avoid deviations, can be used by simply adding as a Chrome extension, enhances app speed, and requires no setup for the code base modification. And if you’re wondering whether the catch is a complicated setup process, it’s really not: no modification to the codebase is required, so all you need to do is add the React Sight Google extension.

Once this is done, simply open the app or any website that’s running React – when you’re ready to go to work, you’ll just need to open the Chrome Development Tools and click on the React Sight panel. And a final word in its favor: it’s lightweight and unobtrusive, so you’ll barely know it’s there!

Best Open Source Image Manipulation Library: Image Crop Picker

If you’re looking for an open-source library for iOS and Android apps, Image Crop Picker is a powerful choice. What sets this library apart from other similar options is its ability to crop, compress, and multiplicate images.

The tool facilitates free-form or fixed aspect crops, is fully keyboard accessible, has no limit on minimum or maximum crop sizes, and boasts a particularly small footprint. React Native Image does not currently support image cropping by default, which makes the Image Crop Picker tool a handy alternative.

For React Native based on v.60 and above, it’s recommended to use version 0.25 and higher of Image Crop Picker. If you have an older version of the software, you’ll need to apply an earlier version of the Image Crop Picker library.

The Takeaway

If you use React, knowing the best tools to use can help you handle content more efficiently and get more done in a day. Bringing one or more of these solutions on board can enhance the stability of your components, save time, and boost productivity, no matter the size or complexity of your project.