May 2018 Summaries

Structured content is organized in a predictable way, using metadata, to facilitate reuse and evolution of content across multiple channels. Contentful's approach involves splitting content into separate fields or entries, with linked references, allowing editors to work efficiently. The new feature enables navigation between linked entries, reducing context switching and interruptions during the editing workflow. It also allows for "peeking" interaction to see underlying stacks and navigate to them, improving the overall editing experience. This feature is expected to be used in various applications of dynamic page layout building, such as carousels and other components.

Contentful is introducing "space environments" which enables developers to manage and maintain content structure in isolation, making it easier to iterate on the content model without affecting the live website or app. This new feature allows for multiple versions of space-specific data, sandbox environments that start as copies of the master environment, and rapid iterative development with integration with CI/CD pipelines. It also provides flexibility for editors to continuously evolve their content strategy without fear of creating more work for engineers. Thorough testing was conducted with customers before the launch, who reported benefits such as easy testing of content model changes and simplified workflows. Space environments are now available for modern engineering teams, and can be found in Contentful's pricing page and documentation.

A Python Flask app is being built to send campaign messages via SMS using Twilio's Programmable SMS API, with Contentful serving as the content infrastructure. The app will integrate with Contentful's WebApp and API-calls to retrieve digital assets, create content types for voter messages and voter numbers, and deploy to Amazon AWS Lambda using Zappa. To achieve this, a Flask app is being created that uses Contentful's Python SDK to authenticate against the Content Delivery API and retrieve campaign messages, which are then sent via Twilio's Programmable SMS API. Additionally, webhooks will be configured in Contentful to trigger on changes made to content stored with Contentful, calling AWS Lambda functions. The goal of this project is to help a politician, Polly Politician, get as many votes as possible by sending campaign messages via SMS.

Static sites are gaining popularity, and many publishers like Smashing Magazine use static site generation without worrying about scalable server setups. However, this approach comes with challenges such as guaranteeing short build times, especially when generating large numbers of pages. The author recently faced a problem where their private website's build time was taking over 10 minutes due to the generation of SVG placeholder images using SQIP. To speed up the build process on Netlify, they implemented a custom caching layer, utilizing Contentful's API and storing generated SVGs in a cache folder that persists across builds. This approach allows for faster build times by reusing previously generated files, making it an optimal solution for large static sites.

This is a step-by-step guide on how to create a static portfolio site using Contentful as the content manager, Next.js for data display, and Netlify for hosting. The author starts by setting up their content types in Contentful and then creates a new project with Next.js to display the data. They use a script to fetch the data from Contentful and write it to disk, and then create React components to display the data. After configuring the site, they deploy it to Netlify using a build hook to automate the deployment process. The final step is to set up a webhook in Contentful to push updates to Netlify, allowing for seamless integration between the platforms.

Graphviz, an open-source graph visualization software, allows users to render beautiful graphs with minimal effort through a compact domain-specific markup language. The author has used Graphviz in the past to visualize content structures for game developers and now wants to use it to visualize their own Contentful spaces. To achieve this, they need to familiarize themselves with Graphviz's graph description language called "DOT" and then generate DOT markup from their Contentful space data using JavaScript and Lodash. The resulting graph shows the interconnectedness of content entities in a meaningful way, providing clarity on how complex structured content can be represented visually.