July 2018 Summaries

Marketo is a comprehensive marketing automation platform that can be utilized extensively by various arms of a full-blown marketing department, but it has a steep learning curve and some features can seem tricky to implement. Marketo forms use inline styles and have a plain default design, which requires customization to align with the brand's own branding. To overcome this challenge, Contentful used UI extensions to create a workaround that removed conflicting styles from Marketo forms and styled them using SASS @extend with their own form design's styles. A UI extension was built in Contentful to address the tedious process of manually embedding forms on each page, offering authors a dropdown menu to select the desired form. However, there was a hurdle to overcome due to Marketo's CORS restrictions, which required building a Lambda function hosted on Netlify to perform server-side API calls. The UI extension can be used by installing it from Contentful's Extensions section and configuring its settings with the Lambda function URL endpoint.

The introduction of space environments in Contentful is a significant update that provides more comprehensive coverage of customer needs, improving the productivity of developers and managers alike. The key features include making webhooks and user roles aware of environments, which addresses common pain points such as copying content between spaces and proliferating spaces within an organization. This feature enables businesses to work on changes to their content structure in a fast, reliable, and transparent way, using automated tests and migration scripts to minimize risks. The introduction of space environments has been widely adopted by enterprise customers, with many praising its ability to prototype new features without risking accidental breaks, reduce overhead, and improve predictability.

Static site generators are gaining traction, and their ecosystem is expanding beyond the developer audience to become a tool for content publishing. This new wave of static site generators has an entire ecosystem that makes it a more comprehensive solution than traditional site-building tools and content management systems. The current generation of static site generators comes with an upside-down stack approach, where data comes first and is what you enter the process with, versus being something that is sought after only during an ongoing process. This vision is already present in modern build systems like Concourse CI and has significant implications for serverless technologies, particularly when combined with event-driven workloads. The popularity of static site generators can be attributed to their ability to handle dynamic content and data changes, making them a promising trend in the evolution of web architectures.

GraphQL is a query language for APIs that allows developers to define the structure of their data and request only what they need, making it more efficient than traditional REST APIs. The GraphQL API at Contentful uses abstract syntax trees (ASTs) to represent schema definitions and parse queries, providing a rich ecosystem for development and tools like GraphiQL for exploration. The content infrastructure at Contentful allows users to define the structure of their content freely, making support for GraphQL more complex, but enabling features like schema stitching, which combines multiple APIs into a single endpoint. The GraphQL API is designed to be strongly-typed, with type definitions defining how data should look and what queries are allowed, providing a new level of power in API development.