June 2021 Summaries

As Pride month progressed and companies changed their logos to reflect the Pride flag, the Contentful team considered following suit. They brought up the topic in their LGBTQ+ slack channel and asked for community feedback. The group decided not to use the rainbow logo unless accompanied by a public statement outlining how they support the LGBTQ+ community. A Hungarian transgender woman shared her personal story of finding refuge and acceptance at Contentful, highlighting the importance of diversity, inclusion, and belonging. The company values these principles and aims to create an environment where everyone feels accepted for who they are, regardless of background or identity. Contentful is committed to making meaningful differences in the lives of their team members and pledges to listen to feedback and make intentional changes towards progress.

When developing an app for Contentful using the App Framework, you can now host it directly on Contentful without relying on third-party solutions, thanks to the introduction of "app hosting". This new feature allows developers to upload their application in bundles, which simplifies the process of finding a suitable hosting provider and provides various development features. The app bundle should contain an index.html file as the main entry point, along with any necessary assets like CSS and JavaScript files. Contentful offers a quickstart tool, create-contentful-app, to help new developers get started, and also provides a simple three-step process for bundling and hosting apps. While some common errors may occur during the upload process, such as missing index.html or incorrect file structure, these can usually be fixed by checking the developer console for errors and ensuring that all necessary files are uploaded correctly.

A great customer support team is crucial in building a stronger product, and knowledge management is key to its success. A strong knowledge base empowers customers with self-service support portals and in-product support, supports internal teams with consistent processes and access to information, and involves the support team in improving the customer experience. Organizations can build powerful knowledge bases that reduce costs through self-service options, more efficient support processes, and greater consistency, leading to increased customer satisfaction and revenue growth. To measure the effectiveness of customer support, it's essential to look at outcomes that tie to product strength, efficient processes, and job fulfillment, such as identifying and solving root causes behind recurring complaints, empowering customers with self-service options, and tracking employee happiness. By unifying silos of knowledge and integrating the knowledge base with other business systems, companies can create a seamless combination of self-service and live support, leading to improved customer experiences and increased revenue.

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, customer experience relies heavily on content, which has become a central element in powering online customer experiences during the pandemic. Brands that can quickly create and deliver content-rich digital experiences have gained a competitive advantage by adapting to changing consumer needs and behaviors. The Contentful platform provides a flexible and scalable solution for creating, managing, and publishing content across various digital channels, enabling brands to build bespoke solutions that meet their specific needs. This flexibility has allowed companies to experiment, innovate, and respond to changes in the market and customer needs more effectively. Additionally, agile ecommerce brands have seen increased sales by leveraging Contentful's platform, which has also facilitated digital transformation for businesses across various industries, from retail to hospitality. As a result, these brands are now poised to continue developing new experiences with flexible tech stacks that enable them to meet whatever comes next in the ever-evolving digital landscape.

Rangle, a company that offers digital strategy and technology services, used Contentful's content platform to launch a new `.uk` regionalized website for the telehealth company Hims & Hers in just 30 days by implementing a light design system called the "design system launcher" in Contentful. The launcher enables fast builds and changes to websites by providing an integrated design system that allows marketers to create on-brand content without relying on designers or developers. This approach streamlines work and communication, allowing businesses to move faster and achieve their goals. With the launcher, Rangle helps clients build a custom foundational layer that underpins business goals and sets technology teams up for success. The goal is not just to provide an integrated design system but to empower client builders to innovate and create better customer experiences. Contentful's platform provides businesses with the toolkit they need to move fast, and its design system launcher is part of an ecosystem of tools that enables rapid growth and future-proofing.

You want to filter blog posts by linked topic using the GraphQL API, but the documentation states that it's not possible to filter on fields of Type Array<Link>. However, you can use the linkedFrom field to achieve this. To do so, first query your topicCollection and then fetch a single topic by slug. Then, request the blog post collection items that reference the referenced topic using the linkedFrom field. This allows you to effectively retrieve all entries that reference entries of Type Array<Link>.

Portaltech Reply has formed a partnership with Contentful and SAP Commerce Cloud to offer its customers a seamless ecommerce experience, connecting the two platforms to provide up-to-date product content on the front end and complete orders or assist customers with self-developed functionalities on the backend. According to Esther Fesenmeier, managing director at Portaltech Reply, this partnership marks their best decision yet, as SAP Commerce Cloud offers a powerful platform for ecommerce and Contentful provides a modern and lightweight solution for marketing and content departments to work easily with the system. Reply prioritizes its customers, having grown from 83 employees in 1997 to employing 9,000 people with sales at $1.1 billion in 2020. The company is a Silver Partner with Contentful and a Gold Partner with SAP, offering a range of services including ecommerce implementation, headless solutions, and digital strategy. This partnership enables Reply's customers to build commerce platforms, bring them forward, and optimize them for more growth and efficiency, using the SAP Commerce Cloud connector as a ready-to-use app in Contentful.

This month's newsletter is focused on resources about Twitterbots, Blazor code starters, Rich Text tricks, and new Contentful feature releases. The community shared various projects built using Contentful, including a Twitter bot that automatically tweets new articles and a Blazor starter for ASP.NET Core. New features released by Contentful include the Entry References API, Releases API, and Scheduled Actions API, which enable users to collect references of an entry and its descendants, group multiple content entries for simultaneous publication, and create actions to be performed at a given time in the future. The community is also using tools like whocanuse.com to understand color contrast and AVPress to optimize video files right in the browser.

The Forrester Wave report highlights the importance of collaboration between digital content editors and developers in building agile content management systems (CMSes). It praises Contentful as a Strong Performer, citing its microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native SaaS and headless architecture. This MACH-enabled technology enables companies to innovate and launch new experiences swiftly, while also empowering content authors with the power to create and manage structured content independently of developers. The report emphasizes the need for agile CMS platforms that can deliver personalized omnichannel experiences at scale, and Contentful's capabilities in this area are particularly noteworthy. Additionally, the release of Compose and Launch apps enhances the content creation and delivery experience, providing a more intuitive and user-friendly interface for non-technical users and enabling teams to work together seamlessly. The report concludes that Contentful improves collaboration between content editors and developers, giving them free will to do what they do best while de-risking changes to the backend.

As the Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at Contentful, Sabiha Chunawala leads a legal team that supports the company's growth while maintaining a strong focus on employee well-being and development. The team processes over 200 contracts per quarter, working closely with sales teams to create contract-awareness knowledge and mitigate potential legal issues. To avoid burnout, Chunawala emphasizes the importance of separating work from personal life, fostering an inclusive team culture that encourages collaboration and teamwork. She also prioritizes employee growth and development through regular one-on-one meetings, education initiatives, and recognition programs. By promoting a culture of inclusion, diversity, and continuous learning, Chunawala aims to drive Contentful's success while creating a positive work environment for her team members.