In the last post, we have described headless CMS. Headless CMS architecture is rising in popularity in the development world.
This model allows breakthrough user experiences, gives developers the great flexibility to innovate, and helps site owners future-proof their builds by allowing them to refresh the design without re-implementing the whole CMS.
One of headless CMS is Contentful. Contentful platform lets you create, manage and distribute content to any platform. It gives you total freedom to create your own content model so you can decide which content you want to manage.
With an uncluttered user interface, Contentful is an efficient tool for creating and managing your content online, either alone or in team. You can assign custom roles and permissions to team members, add validations depending on the kind of content you have to insert and add media such as images, documents, sounds or video.
Contentful has a three-step process. First, you define a content model which is independent from any presentation layer that defines what kind of content you want to manage. In a second step, you and other internal or external editors can manage all of the content in easy-to-use and interactive editing interface. In the third step, the content is served in a presentation-independent way.
Being presentation-layer agnostic is one of the strengths of Contentful because you will be able to reuse your content across any platform.
To create a web site, you will either have to code it yourself and load content from Contentful API or work with someone who can develop the web site for you. Contentful is the platform where you can update the content of your web site, a mobile app or any other platform that displays content.
Contentful runs on all browsers. Contentful offers the most powerful REST APIs and the only enterprise-grade in-production GraphQL API.
There are three steps you'll have to take in order to deliver content from Contentful to your apps and websites.
1. Create your Content Model
The Content Model is the first step to structuring your content properly. It consists of creating content types that will accept only certain types of data for entry. For example, when creating an interactive quiz, you will need to add something that is a question, multiple answers, an indicator of the correct answer and potentially an image. This can be set up in the content model, so you can then easily just add as many "Questions" to your Quiz as you want.
2. Add Entries and Assets
Entries refer to the content itself. Entries could be blog posts, product features or ingredients of a recipe or any other content. These entries will depend on your previously created content model. In this phase you can also add assets like images, sounds, videos and many other files.
3. Deliver your content with our API
The delivery part of the content may or may not be left only to developers. In this step you set up API Keys that will determine which content will go to which platform. After the delivery is set up correctly, your content is then available for consumption as soon as you hit the “Publish” button.
We have over 18 years experience with numerous CMS, so we can help you with Contentful as well. Call us today for a free, no obligation consultation.
