Why the CMS by Contentful Is a Great Choice

In the first part of my conversation with Klaus and our Wroclaw Site Manager Tomasz, we talked about what customers can expect from Contentful. In the second part, we have a look at their software, the headless content management system from Contentful.

What do you like about Contentful as a software product?

Klaus: The solution is easy to grasp and gives you broad coverage for a wide range of use cases. The platform is highly available and reliable. This way, users can concentrate on working on their content whenever they need to. Its simplicity makes it easy to roll out to content creators- users can quickly start being productive without lengthy onboarding and training.

Tomasz: The platform is built for extensibility and customization - in a controlled manner. However, the folks from Contentful themselves add new features cautiously, which is also a good thing for us, as they do not bloat the platform with rarely used features.

It can be described as a content store that is user-friendly for both business users and developers. For business users, it means a great user experience for creating structured content. For developers, it is more about convenient and efficient querying for content.

What makes the Contentful CMS so easy to work with for business users?

Klaus: As I said, the onboarding of new users is easy. And with features such as Single Sign-On (SSO), user roles, and permissions, it is suitable for large enterprises.

The platform is strictly focused on the content itself and not the frontend where the content is displayed. Content elements are being added to the data repository as modular content entries. From there, these entries can be embedded into various frontend environments, such as different web pages, mobile apps, smartwatches, digital advertising ecosystems, or out-of-home displays - the possibilities are only limited by your imagination. And when you need to replace, remove or change an entry, you do it once, and the entry is updated everywhere where it is used. This massively reduces the risk of breaking the system and keeps the content display in sync: no dead links, no outdated content, no inconsistencies.

"Contentful offers editors a consistent editorial experience."

, says Klaus Unterkircher.

For editors, contentful comes with rich built-in functionalities. One example: Contentful has solid out-of-the-box media handling for images. Instead of using an external tool to adapt images for different displays, you can do it all in Contentful. You only need to upload one image for several use cases to Contentful instead of uploading a separate image for each use case.

What I also like is that users operate in a controlled environment. That means that customizations have a clear scope, and users do not get lost in a marketplace with tons of extensions that all try to address the same issue.

All in all, Contentful offers editors a consistent editorial experience.

And what makes it so easy for developers?

Tomasz: From a technical point of view, I like that Contentful is a true API-first solution. The gain for developers is obvious: you can get everything that is available in the UI through the API. Also, the platform is built from scratch to be a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). No monolithic, old-fashioned, on-premise CMS that pretends to be a cloud solution! That gives customers a real boost when starting the development process, as does the global presence of your data (through the CDN). 

I have already mentioned that developers love Contentful for how easily it works with content. The key for that is a powerful, modern querying language - GraphQL. But the truly amazing thing is how fast Contentful can respond to your complex queries!

"Developers love Contentful for ease of work with content."

, says Tomasz Strumiński.

There are a few other things that developers like: awesome tooling to programmatically migrate content and environments. Environments are copies of your content which you can create with the click of a button, and which are usually ready for you in just a few seconds. Combined with migration tooling, Contentful is a powerful tool for experimenting, developing, and powering software solutions. Do you want to move your development schema to a staging environment to test everything before going to production? Just create a staging environment as a copy of your production environment and apply your migration tasks- within a few seconds you can start pre-production testing.

Wow. It sounds like flawless software for its purpose. Are there no downsides?

Tomasz: No software is perfect. Some features have a good side and a bad side which are deeply connected. GraphQL, for example, can only perform so well because it is limited in certain areas. Customers, for example, should be aware of API call limits when they are not on an Enterprise plan. I guess the reason for this limitation is to allow all clients a similarly performant user experience - at a reasonable price.

The built-in video hosting also may not meet the highest expectations. But at the same time, video hosting is not a core competency of Contentful, and this is easy to address by introducing dedicated solutions that integrate well with Contentful. Additionally, if you are used to more traditional content management systems for web publishing, you may miss a native page model and a sitemap.

Klaus: The good thing is: The folks at Contentful are happy when their partners come up with useful extensions that, in return, allow Contentful to focus on their core competencies. For example, we at Bright IT have been working on a sitemap tool that makes it substantially easier to create and manage large (and in some cases small) websites powered by Contentful. And we have just launched it at the Contentful Fast Forward 2021. Find out more about it on getarboretum.com.