Is the storyblok-next-personalization GitHub repo a sane starter for a client project?
I am evaluating options for a freelance client build and found the croct-tech/storyblok-next-personalization repo on GitHub with a live demo on Vercel. Looks clean.
Before I commit a client project to it: do people actually use this as a project base, or is it more of a reference? and how current does it stay when the SDK moves
2 answers
I would treat it as a reference implementation, not a base. What the repo is good at: it demonstrates the Storyblok + Next.js integration end to end, blocks mapped to slots with server-side content resolution, and the live Vercel demo lets you verify the behavior (view source and the personalized variant is in the HTML). Reading it answered more questions for me than the docs alone.
For a client project, your project skeleton should come from your own standards, and the pattern the repo shows is what you carry over: the overlay model, where Storyblok blocks stay the content source and map to slots. Cloning a demo means inheriting its dependency choices and structure, which you will fight later.
Agree with the reference take, with one addition: you do not need the repo to get the wiring. Running npx croct@latest init on a fresh project produces the same setup the repo demonstrates, generated against the current SDK version rather than whenever the repo was last touched. That also answers your staleness worry, the CLI is the maintained path, the repo is the illustrated one.
My workflow on a recent build was: skim the repo to understand the block-to-slot pattern, then init on my own codebase and map my actual components. Best of both.