October 2022 Summaries

Contentful has announced new orchestration capabilities designed to help companies launch digital experiences faster, consistently, and at scale. These features allow teams to more easily connect content across environments, quickly create content with pre-existing content models, and build apps that can connect to any environment from a central place. The goal is to harness the power of composable content and augment it with additional features like personalization, metadata management, tagging, and more, without custom development. By enabling teams to work autonomously, yet in coordination, they can create, manage, and deliver content with greater cost-efficiency, consistency, and speed. The new capabilities include a way to connect content across environments and spaces, facilitating content reuse while eliminating complicated workflows and duplicative efforts. This will enable businesses to deliver dynamic experiences that are consistent across all channels, brands, markets, and the customer journey, starting with providing teams building them with tools to deliver both speed and scale.

Contentful has pioneered the headless CMS market and is now leading the way in composable content, a new category of content management that involves breaking down digital content into small pieces for reuse across channels and experiences. The company's Composable Content Platform allows businesses to create modular content that can be easily composed and reused, enabling faster and more efficient content creation. This platform is designed to help businesses work independently yet in coordination with each other, streamlining the process of creating high-quality digital experiences. With its new orchestration capabilities, Contentful aims to reduce manual migration and increase developer efficiency, while also providing a workspace for content teams called Contentful Studio that puts power directly into their hands. The company's platform is built to be extensible by design, allowing customers to adapt it to meet unique business needs and use cases through its App Framework and Marketplace of ready-to-use apps.

The Developer Showcase at Contentful has received a significant response from the community, showcasing imaginative and ingenious uses of their platform. The team has provided ongoing support, featuring projects on social media channels and reaching out to individuals for guest blog posts. A selection of ten impressive projects was highlighted, including a Contentful app that implements conditional fields in the Entry Editor, an online community for families who pack lunches, and a website that allows users to search and preview YouTube videos directly within the CMS interface. The showcase continues to grow, with more submissions coming in every week, and encourages developers to share their projects and inspire others.

### Lambda@Edge is a widely used computing and content delivery service in Amazon CloudFront distribution that enables organizations to execute their applications and websites at the edge locations closest to their users, providing flexibility to customize and target specific needs such as addressing peak traffic times based on time zone or region. It uses AWS Lambda to run serverless functions on demand according to predefined events, allowing for cost-effective deployment and scaling of digital content and applications. With its ability to eliminate the need to build and manage physical infrastructures like data centers and server farms worldwide, Lambda@Edge improves the performance and global distribution of applications while reducing costs and administrative effort. It also provides features such as user authentication, real-time tracking and analytics, image resizing and compression, SEO optimization, security enhancements, bot mitigation, intelligent routing, and automatic scaling, making it an essential service for organizations looking to leverage the AWS Worldwide Network backbone and infrastructure.

Application development has become increasingly agile, resulting in more flexible applications that can adapt to changing requirements. To accommodate these changes, the data structures used by these applications need to be more flexible as well. Many systems, including Contentful and TypeScript, have adopted this trend, providing flexible data structures such as content types and types. However, updating these models can be challenging, especially in legacy contexts or large-scale applications. Models are typically defined across multiple modules and systems, making it essential to keep them in sync for the application to function properly. Updating a model often requires changes on connected modules and systems, which can cause unforeseen problems if not managed correctly. To overcome this challenge, different approaches have been developed, including manual syncing, running migrations from the TypeScript code base, or using Modelberry Factory. The key strategy for working with flexible models on separate systems is syncing the models, which requires a simple approach to communication and updates among the development team.

The author of this article shares their experience of automating repetitive tasks in managing submissions to the Contentful Developer Showcase using Airtable and Zapier. They started by identifying two manual tasks that could be automated: entering data into a Google Sheet and adding final details to Contentful. The author then migrated to Airtable, which provided better features for creating automation workflows, configuring views, and having an easy-to-use API. An automation workflow was created in Zapier to handle form submissions, and another workflow was created in Airtable to add the data to Contentful using JavaScript code. The workflows saved a significant amount of time, allowing the team to focus on highlighting the amazing work the community is doing. However, there are still some tasks that need to be manually handled, such as adding images to Contentful.

The web's new architecture, Modular, has fundamentally shifted the relationship between business and technology, requiring a new model of thinking that dictates who'll win and why. The concept of headless CMS emerged as a solution to traditional Content Management Systems' limitations, with companies like Impossible Foods adopting modular architectures to support growth and customer needs. The COVID pandemic accelerated this shift, making composable content and modular architecture essential for digital success. As the ecosystem around Modular continues to evolve, understanding its principles is crucial for anyone involved in content or customer experience.

We've been attending and sponsoring conferences worldwide, including a developer meetup in London on October 26th, where we'll host a round of lightning talks followed by deeper dives into targeted topics. We've also published various resources on composable content, content design, and our Images API, including a deep dive into WebP, a walkthrough on creating Contentful blog starter templates, and an explanation of the benefits and challenges of using composable architecture. Additionally, we're hosting developer events in London, San Francisco, and other locations, and invite you to join us for our livestreams on Twitch Tuesdays at 11 a.m. ET/5 p.m. CET. We've also introduced new features such as the Merge app, programmatically managing views and folders using the Content Management API, App Actions, and updates for custom apps. Furthermore, we're hiring for various roles, including a Senior Developer Advocate and Backend Software Engineer - Javascript, and invite you to explore our careers page and developer portal for more information.

Creating content for global markets requires more than just translating it into different languages; it demands an understanding of cultural nuances that can affect how content is received by target audiences. To achieve this, companies need to adopt a localization strategy early on, considering factors such as idioms, expressions, and metaphors tied to specific cultures, inclusive language, passive voice usage, branded terms, script directionality, regional dialectical variations, and visual metaphors that may cause cross-cultural confusion. By taking these nuances into account, businesses can reduce the time and cost associated with updating existing content, ensure a consistent brand voice, and create digestible content for a global audience.