Hi everyone. I am new, I do not have much experience in contentful. I have a project to implement, consisting of several pages. In fact, each page is quite different from each other. My requirements state that every content on the website is to be editable. I was wondering if contentful is a good choice in this case?
My imagination would be to create a content type Page that would contain basic fields like title, slug, meta, and also a reference field for the layout. Then I would create layouts for individual pages such as home, blog, products, contact etc. Each layout will have sections for a particular page.
It seems to me that such a thing makes sense, but it seems to me that the number of these layouts and components will be very large and I do not know if it will be easy for business and also for the developers themselves. Also, I don’t really know if, from a developer point of view, it’s easy to get a few nested references.
Has anyone ever had a similar case? It seems quite common. The tutorials on the Internet look simple, because usually all tutorials concern simple layouts and repetitive content. I have to let the business edit all of them, and in addition, it’s quite difficult to separate common elements on individual pages. Is contentful a good choice?
Your approach, if you will decide to use Contentful, seems quite solid. I can try to add few things to help you understand if Contentful is a good choice (I believe so ).
The idea to use common content-types, like the ‘Page’ you mention, and more specific ones with reference fields is a constant trade-off between having the right elements, but also not having circular dependencies and too many options in one ‘do-it-all’ content-type. For our users, this is often a constant progress in defining an initial structure, test it and refine it. Fortunately, tools like our Scripted Migrations would help you change things without the worry to ‘forget’ some new fields or functionality: Scripting migrations with the Contentful CLI | Contentful
Another suggestion would be to use environments from the very beginning. This would allow the ‘business’ to keep adding and editing content, meanwhile you could use a ‘development’ or ‘staging’ environment for functionalities (similar to Git). You could duplicate environments to be sure you always have the latest data to work with or our CLI import/export tool.
Querying the content, either via normal API or SDK, is (if I can add) very well documented, and, so yes, it’s easy to get nested references, with both REST or GraphQL API.
In addition, you could follow us on Twitter (or via Newsletter): https://twitter.com/contentful
We often have recording and webinar from successful use-cases, where our users/clients speak about Content Modellng and how a particular solution applies to their business case.
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