gatsby-plugin-mdx v4 can't be used for blogs or other layouts that need to display multiple Markdown sources

[edmcman]

I just attempted to convert my website to use gatsby-plugin-mdx, and was astonished to find that I can't. Like most blogs, the main page of my site shows several blog entries. But in v4, gatsby-plugin-mdx only supports rendering MDX using the confusing contentFilePath query string. As far as I can tell, this means that you can't build a normal blog display that shows more than one blog article, because the only way to render it is by creating a page. This is a huge limitation.

The gatsby-plugin-mdx includes a tiny note in v3 to v4: Breaking Changes:

As mentioned above the html field was removed from the GraphQL node. We know that some of you used this for e.g. gatsby-plugin-feed. Unfortunately, for compatibility and performance reasons we had to remove it. We recommend using the excerpt field in the meantime until we find a feasible solution to provide MDX rendered as HTML. If you have any suggestions, please comment on the GitHub Discussion.

This is a huge limitation, and honestly I think it should be one of the first things listed in the plugin's README. It's very frustrating to convert your site to use MDX, only to find that the plugin requires you to shoehorn your site into a very specific mold, without being upfront about it.

It's not hard to find other people struggling with this.

To be concrete, here are some things that would help this situation:

• Being up front in the gatsby-plugin-mdx documentation that this is a large limitation. Try to save people time from futilely trying to convert their sites.
• Explaining why this strange design decision was made. Reading between the lines, I assume there is some limitation with MDX v2 that makes it difficult to use the usual gatsby transformer model.
• Fix the limitation!