April 2021 Summaries

A long-term delivery partner is a crucial component of a successful digital product's journey, from conception to creation and eventual delivery to clients and end-users. Choosing the right provider can be daunting with many options available, but a reliable partner can offer valuable expertise, experience, and a mutually respectful relationship. Trust, transparency, realistic expectations, and a focus on people rather than products are key aspects to consider when selecting a long-term delivery partner. It's essential to assess their approach to crisis management, risk mitigation, and team dynamics to ensure a harmonious collaboration. Ultimately, a good partner shares your moral code, values, and industry expertise, and can help you achieve your ambitions while offering value for money and minimizing risks.

I recently sat down with Marc Kiefer, who shared his experience of joining Contentful in February 2020 and how it has been a great fit for him. The company's core values and culture played a significant role in convincing him to join, as did the friendly and welcoming atmosphere. As a strategic account executive specializing in the automotive sector, Marc was able to achieve more than 200% of his yearly quota within a month and later got promoted to senior named account executive for the DACH region. He credits the company's cohesive vision and talented team members with making his job easier. One challenge he faced was communicating during the pandemic, but he adapted by using Zoom for one-on-one meetings and prioritizing his personal life through a daily blocker in his calendar. Marc emphasizes the importance of being humble and open to feedback, as well as being willing to learn and grow. Contentful is currently looking for talented people to join their team, and Marc's experience serves as a great example of what it's like to work at the company.

To deliver successful digital projects with Contentful, it's essential to start with clear planning, communication, and organization. This involves defining project capabilities and platforms needed, understanding stakeholder expectations, and establishing a diverse team with the right skills. A well-structured kick-off meeting sets the stage for collaboration, while ongoing communication and regular demos help maintain momentum and engagement. Project management software like JIRA or Trello can aid in tracking progress, managing scope changes, and staying organized throughout the project's lifecycle, ultimately leading to successful delivery that meets organizational goals and objectives.

This post discusses the Open Graph protocol, a way to display and share information about web resources on the internet, particularly when sharing websites and URLs on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. It explains how to create an app using Contentful's App Framework that can handle complexity and pass data between different app locations, making it useful for creating cohesive experiences for editors as they work on content that is meant to be visualized in different ways. The post guides through the process of creating a new content type called "Open Graph" with fields such as title, content, image, and URL, and then building an app using React that can automatically generate titles based on referenced blog posts and display previews of the Open Graph data.

We recently migrated one of our clients from Prismic to Contentful, a headless content management system that's built for fast-growing teams and enterprises. The migration was successful and went smoothly, with the client releasing into three markets and two applications within just one week. To make the transition faster, we identified compatible content types and developed scripts to identify similar slices and create a single content type, eliminating the need for multiple content types. We also eliminated unnecessary content types by thoughtfully merging them and reworked the user interface to ensure it worked seamlessly with the new solution. The key to a successful migration is finding ways to mitigate the impact of changes on the user interface and managing the growth of content effectively.

This tutorial demonstrates how to create a set of statically generated article list pages using Next.js and data from the Contentful GraphQL API. The application fetches data at build time, eliminating the need for client-side state, and uses Static Site Generation (SSG) to pre-render HTML pages. The blog post summaries are fetched from the Contentful API and displayed on the front end using a PostList component. The pagination is handled by a Pagination component that renders links to previous and next pages based on the current page number. The application can be built with webhooks in Contentful, which triggers a rebuild of the site every time a new change is published.

Shy and I embarked on a livestream to customize the Contentful reference field using the App Framework, aiming to provide novel functionality. Understanding how editors interact with entry data is crucial when building custom apps. The App Framework allows developers to create visually similar custom apps that can display more data from referenced entries, enhancing the user experience. To start, we used the create-contentful-app CLI tool to quickly get an app up and running, followed by creating an AppDefinition, which serves as a blueprint for how the app will interact inside the Contentful experience. We then assigned our custom reference field app to a field in our content model, enabling us to display more data from referenced entries. By leveraging Forma 36's components and utilities, we created custom functionality that transformed the default reference field experience into one that meets our specific use case. The process showcases the flexibility of the App Framework and Contentful's capabilities for building bespoke digital experiences.

The Contentful support team successfully adapted to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, solving 43% more support tickets than in 2019 and increasing their team size by 31%. They achieved this through creative problem-solving, such as playing a symphony over a video call, and implementing new strategies like virtual collaboration tools and remote work arrangements. The company also expanded its expertise in virtual collaboration, which will support its global expansion plans, while maintaining a sense of community and connection among team members despite physical distancing measures. Through these efforts, Contentful was able to restore calm and productivity for its customers, even in the midst of uncertainty.

The importance of building, improving, software, and speed in creating better software lies in understanding their interdependencies and avoiding tradeoffs between flexibility, extensibility, quality, and speed. Brands like Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Casper Sleep disrupted industries by building digital-first experiences that engaged consumers, while companies like Lyft and IKEA use flexible solutions to meet customer demands. Building or assembling software empowers brands to meet customer needs in new ways, while assembling from components results in software that is flexible, extensible, and scalable. To deliver seamless, connected experiences, a content platform unifies each stage of the customer journey, cutting across silos and channels. By putting a content platform at the heart of the digital experience stack, teams can empower everyone to focus on building better software, faster, together. The old adage "time is money" has never been more true in this fast-paced digital world, where brands that accelerate their speed to market have an advantage over those that don't.

Contentful has introduced "embargoed assets" to its platform, a feature that allows customers to restrict access to cached assets on the global CDN infrastructure, using an authentication mechanism that only returns assets to visitors signing their requests with valid signatures. This new feature enables customers to control who has access to content authored through Contentful, and can be used for various use cases such as intranets and extranets, paywalls and gated content, campaigns and product launches. The feature is now available on the Contentful Premium tier and can be activated on a per-space basis. To implement embargoed assets, customers need to integrate the URL-signing solution into their authorization workflow, but Contentful has provided a tutorial and FAQ section to help with this process. The solution adds 20-40 milliseconds of latency to requests, which is imperceptible to end users.

The Contentful Rich Text field on the front end can display links or linked entries and assets by utilizing the Contentful REST API and GraphQL API, which are used to query data from a content type in order to render links inside the Rich Text field. The Contentful JavaScript SDK is used to resolve linked entries and assets, and it provides a rich tree of data that converts raw nodes into a structured format for easier consumption. The include parameter can be used to specify the depth of the resolved tree, allowing developers to control how much data is returned from the API. Understanding the structure of the data responses from Contentful enables developers to choose which APIs and methods are best suited to their applications, and also empowers them to resolve linked assets and entries themselves if needed.

This post explains how to render linked assets and entries inside the Contentful Rich Text field on the front end, focusing on a JavaScript ecosystem but applicable to other tech stacks as well. It covers how Contentful returns items and their linked entries and assets, resolving links manually or with the JavaScript SDK, which uses the contentful-resolve-response package to convert flat nodes into a rich tree of data. The post also discusses rendering HTML for each node using Rich Text field renderers like `@contentful/rich-text-react-renderer` and how to handle linked entries when using the GraphQL API, requiring manual mapping of linked assets and entries in the renderOptions.

This month, Contentful released several new features and tools, including Compose, a page-based interface designed for non-technical users; Launch, which allows multiple teams to collaborate on content publishing; tags, a user-defined keyword feature for creating arbitrary content collections; and three new API endpoints for bulk actions, releases, and references. The company also introduced a React/Next.js starter, upcoming livestreams with DevRel team members, and a research panel for power users to influence product development. Additionally, Contentful announced the availability of its Ninetailed Personalization app and Repeater app, which enable personalized experiences and repeatable lists, respectively.

We've improved the median response time of full-text search in Contentful by 35% through a combination of optimizations, including input string normalization, query planning improvements, and schema adjustments. The new implementation uses a SQL function to normalize input strings, allowing for parallelization and pre-evaluation, which reduces query planning time. Additionally, combining text values into a single row per locale improves the performance of full-text searches by leveraging GIN indexes more efficiently. These changes enable editorial teams to quickly locate content using full-text search, tagging, or browsing tag collections, ultimately enhancing productivity and workflow efficiency.

Contentful has released new tags and tag-based permissions features to help teams categorize, access and reuse content more efficiently. These features enable platform administrators to define a taxonomy and centrally manage tags, making it easier for content editors to find, edit or publish content. Tags also provide granular permissions structures, allowing autonomous teams to specify relevant tags for their teams. Additionally, these features speed up developer workflows by letting developers manage tagged content via Contentful's APIs. This improves the searchability and governance of structured content, creating a cohesive brand message across digital experiences published on multiple channels.

As a director of platform strategy at Contentful, I spent my first 90 days talking to nearly 100 digital leaders and learned five key insights that propel companies into the ranks of digital leaders. Business outcomes are crucial for driving results, not just making changes for change's sake, and customers have achieved significant success with Contentful in improving project outcomes such as schedule, scope, and budget. To achieve business outcomes, it's essential to tie investments in new technologies back to customer, business, and technical outcomes, and companies should focus on high-value use cases that deliver a seamless experience for their end-users. Contentful enables modular business capabilities by providing a consistent mechanism for content, and leading digital brands are empowering builders with custom stacks composed of tools that work with them, not against them. The key to stability amidst change is ensuring the customer is at the center of your technology universe, and Contentful offers a reliable infrastructure that meets this need.

The XTM Connect app is an integration between Contentful and XTM Cloud that enables the easy globalization of content, streamlining translation workflows and automating tasks such as file exports and imports, allowing teams to work together seamlessly. The app simplifies and streamlines translation processes, enabling users to launch and manage localization projects from within the Contentful web app, reducing repetitive and monotonous tasks. It also enables automated content workflows, intelligent automation, flexible workflows, and access to machine translation engines, ultimately improving the speed and quality of content deployment to global markets. The integration ensures a connected ecosystem that drives productivity growth and faster time-to-market for content teams.

The Contentful platform has evolved its Content Management API (CMA) to enable developers to manage and publish content at scale, with new endpoints such as bulk actions, releases, and references, which offer improved developer productivity, quicker turnaround times, and reduced ambiguity in publishing outcomes. These endpoints allow developers to batch individual operations into an asynchronous job capable of handling up to 200 items at a time, eliminating ambiguous outcomes and reducing the time it takes to publish large collections. The new API endpoints have been used by early access program participants for various use cases, including running promotional campaigns and doing programmatic SEO, and are available on all current plans and space types.

We discovered the importance of content modeling when shifting from monolithic systems to extensible microservices like Contentful, where decoupled content makes it crucial to get the model right to speed development and minimize time to market. Our experience with monolithic systems taught us that a more focus on specific models instead of generic reusable ones is necessary, and we now emphasize an API-first approach in our digital experience stacks. A key consideration is the role of the customer in content modeling, as they often lack knowledge about considerations regarding content modeling, requiring guidance through the process. We use a "three phase approach" to design models in Contentful's web app, and explain the difference between page-oriented and content-oriented content models, which are independent of presentation, easily reusable, and channel-independent, or organized around a channel with flexibility for content managers.

Contentful's infrastructure team has scaled the platform without major hiccups, despite rapid growth, by investing in teams focused on predictable performance, fleet management, and PaaS. They automate repetitive processes, ensure scalability, and abstract cloud infrastructure complexities to empower internal engineering teams. The team also fine-tunes microservice performance, automates database shard migrations (Zero-Downtime Resharding), and optimizes load distribution across shards. By analyzing real-time activity, they can rebalance the load and achieve optimal utilization of shared database shards. To help internal teams understand slow queries, they employ OpenTelemetry solutions to sample queries, trace requests, and replay suspect queries to establish root causes.

Repeater app is a new tool on the Contentful App Marketplace that helps developers repeat content in a flexible way, allowing them to create custom lists of items or products using JSON fields. The app was built using the App Framework, Forma 36, and TypeScript, and provides a range of features such as automatic resizing, UI components, and hot reloading. It can be easily extended and customized by developers, and is available for free installation on the Contentful App Marketplace. The app is designed to work with Contentful's JSON fields, but also allows for reference fields, and can be used to create powerful repeater apps with custom UI/UX components.