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Contentful Setup for static landing pages?

#1

Hi everyone,

we are currently evaluating if Contentful is the right solution for our purposes. Obviously it is great for all content that fits into a template - blog articles etc.

However, we have many many static landing pages, which are usually unique in their design and content structure, which means they can not be abstracted to a common content type. We want our content editors to be able to edit the content, so that they dont have to deal with the code, so we would like to use contentful for those pages as well. However, creating a new content model for each one of those is not an option due to the limit on content models that come with each plan.

How would you solve this problem? This should be a common issue I guess.
Thanks in advance,
Andre

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#2

so what i can think of:

  1. have a list of references and a content type for every kind of field you might want to use (text, image, …). This seems to be a huge waste of content types to me.
  2. Put the data into a JSON file to allow for page specific content structure --> not very accessible for our content editors
  3. Don’t use contentful for static pages and have our editors use git instead (even less accessible)
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#3

I have Contentful set up on a lot of static sites, and some pages just aren’t editable by the client. It depends on the client, their budget, and their options, but I’ve found that it’s better for them to just keep me on retainer or hire someone that can manage the actual code.

My reasoning is that some pages really need to be designed. They aren’t templates and shouldn’t be. Design takes thought and these pages should be carefully constructed with images and copy working together to tell a story. Clients often can’t do that, which is why they hire designers (hopefully).

I do have one client that edits directly in Github. However, the client is super smart and super rare.

I’m not sure what your role is (designer, developer, etc.). In my use case, I’m a frontend designer, so I’m comfortable designing in the code. If that’s your role as well, I’d suggest you just keep doing the one offs when you need it. If the pages need to be unique, then they should pay for themselves.

Also, I’ve worked with a lot of other CMSs. Clients seem to think that there is some magical CMS out there that lets them edit a webpage like a Word doc. There are some that seem to work that way, but not really. There is no “perfect” CMS, Contentful is the closest I’ve found.

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#4

Hi pk, thanks for your reply.

You are right that a lot of times it would be better if editors could not change content on static pages, since it might break the design. However, in our case I am the developer of a company and the users of contentful would be our inhouse content editors. Our website has many static pages, and small changes and optimizations occure quite often, so it would be quite inefficient if I have to do all small changes for them.

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#5

I would love to see more information on this subject.

I’m using a react.js static site generator (Gatsby) that allows programmatic creation of pages.

I use a content type named pages with a setup like this:

page
  slug
  areas (reference field)
      hero-component
      standard-row-component
      specialized-row-component

Each page references specific content-types to build the DOM.

Those specific content types are mapped to a “component” and essentially render a div.row with my content.

The good: This is a great solution for editable landing pages.

The bad: You will run out of content types quickly, which can translate to a rather expensive upgrade.

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