March 2019 Summaries

Contentful has invested in ISO 27001 compliance certification to demonstrate its commitment to information security, improving processes and applying them to the whole business. Senior management support was crucial from the outset, and despite budget and resource challenges, they set out for success. Compliance means that security processes are in place, risks are analyzed, and treated in an educated manner, laying a foundation for future improvements and transforming security as a driver for business growth. The company's journey to certification involved two main phases: asset management and risk management, which led to the development of a set of policies, improved decision-making, and clearer security ownership among employees. With mandatory training and security owners assigned to every feature, Contentful is better equipped to identify and mitigate security threats, earning and keeping trust from its investors, customers, and employees.

Contentful is a content solution that changes the way teams work, making editors, marketers, product owners, and developers more productive by providing separate interfaces for developers and editors that come together seamlessly. The platform offers language-agnostic coding, full disclosure of features such as search, brand element consistency, sitewide updates in minutes, integrated marketing and editorial tools, customizable user controls, decoupled workflows, and a separate content layer from code used to present it on various platforms, allowing teams to work autonomously and efficiently.

As an editor or manager, content operations encompass tasks such as uploading, updating, editing, distributing, and governing content, which have become increasingly time-consuming due to the high volume of content being created for engaging audiences. This can lead to editors taking on too much work, diluting their focus on core editorial tasks, and ultimately not doing these tasks well. To address this issue, it's essential to distinguish between content operations and content marketing or strategy, and allocate a dedicated expert to handle the content infrastructure and day-to-day operations. By hiring or allocating the perfect person for the role, teams can significantly increase the value and reach of their existing content efforts.

GraphQL is a query language that serves as a specification for APIs, offering several benefits including predictability, simplicity, and error reduction. To get started with GraphQL, developers can use Apollo's apollo-link-rest library, which allows them to test out GraphQL without fully integrating it into their backend. By using this library, developers can refactor their existing REST API-based applications to use GraphQL, making it easier to grow and stay up-to-date with the latest technologies. The tutorial demonstrates how to implement a GraphQL client that talks to REST endpoints, create a proof-of-concept (POC) to convince teams to adopt GraphQL, and integrate GraphQL into a React application using Apollo Client and apollo-link-rest.

The traditional enterprise suites and legacy tools used by organizations for managing content operations are inadequate, leading to duplicated work, increased operational costs, and limited oversight. The latest winter product release of the Contentful platform aims to address these issues by providing core tools that enable developers and content creators to stay flexible and minimize silos. The new features include a next-gen rich text editor, custom sidebar, extensibility framework, GraphQL API, and improved extension development capabilities. These enhancements help unify content tools across an enterprise into an authoring hub, solving three critical problems: creating all content in one place, embedding third-party tools and data-backed insights, and delivering content to all digital channels and customer touchpoints.

This article shares the experience of Esa McGavin, a product owner at Contentful, on expanding their use of Contentful to host traditionally hardcoded content. The team aimed to streamline content operations by reusing content and content types, and focused on creating modular chunks of content that could be mixed and matched for different layouts. They also worked closely with editors and stakeholders to customize the editorial interface to meet their needs, making it more intuitive and user-friendly. By doing so, they were able to improve their content infrastructure, reduce technical debt, and provide more business value. The article highlights how Contentful's flexibility and scalability enable teams to continually refine their content model, workflows, presentation, and integrations as they grow and evolve.

Usability is a key aspect of creating effective products that engage users, but it can be challenging to gather structured feedback from users without resorting to vague or unhelpful critiques like "crappy" and “slow". To overcome this challenge, product developers can use usability heuristics, which provide a framework for gathering more specific information about user interactions with an interface. Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics for interface design offer a useful breakdown of segments that can be studied, collected data from, and used to improve a product. By applying these principles, developers can create interfaces that are effective, efficient, and provide high user satisfaction, making it easier for users to interact with the product and increasing the overall user experience.