Contentful CMS is a headless content management system (CMS) and content platform that is both cloud-native and highly extensible.

The platform sits at the heart of a modern tech stack and creates a structure for all content throughout the organization. Organizations can use Contentful to easily manage content, quickly deliver experiences, and publish across channels. While the CMS sits within the content platform to manage content, the content platform uses flexible APIs to deliver that content to create a complete and unified digital experience, using the headless CMS in a smart way to weave features like search and structured content together in a single experience.

In this article, you’ll learn about the Contentful CMS, its benefits, and why more and more companies are opting for this headless solution. We’ll also provide some helpful information about what it’s like using this content platform as a content specialist.

How does the Contentful CMS work?

Moving from a traditional CMS to a headless CMS like Contentful can seem challenging for those accustomed to legacy platforms, but Contentful makes working with a headless CMS seamless.

Contentful’s careful, intuitive choices can win over anyone in no time at all. Like a matryoshka doll, each section on a web page builds on itself neatly in nested layers, allowing you to delve deep into the available content options, including personalization, without needing to open new tabs or stretch your page out unnaturally.

You never get lost from your base layer page because it never goes away. There is no need to scroll through multiple menus or enlist a robust folder system to ensure items don’t get misplaced as they are self-contained on your page.

Connecting pages, be it parent-to-child or related content, might be the most intuitive process. You can map the connections between items visually on each item via the Contentful sidebar, which is a lifesaver when it comes to ensuring nothing goes live that should not be live.

Adding and adjusting media is just as simple with Contentful’s media API. Anything you want to be added to the media filter can be dragged and dropped – in groups no less – and resized, cropped, and otherwise edited in the CMS.

Some of the key concepts and features that make this possible are:

• RESTful API: A stateless API that includes compact JSON payloads provides control over the entire CMS, content assets, and multiple versions.
• Customizable Editor Interface: Customizable UX for authoring various types of content, from rich text to JSON snippets. In addition, Contentful allows the smooth introduction of tags on items, acting as an invisible folder system. Nothing is more satisfying and helpful than a searchable, easily manageable tag, especially when content naming schemes might be on the more flexible side of best practices.
• Secure Previews: Users can preview drafts and entries without being concerned with interrupting service or accidentally publishing content.
• Content Delivery and Management APIs: Contentful’s decoupled APIs enable you to structure content and provide a platform that evolves as your business grows. It uses advanced caching with external APIs to deliver content quickly, reducing page load times and improving performance.
• SDKs and Purpose-Built Apps: Read and write SDKs are available out of the box and provide open-source components for apps.

What are the Benefits of Contentful CMS?

Contentful comes with numerous benefits that companies can capitalize on:

• Agile Ecommerce: Ecommerce is a crucial component for modern enterprises, and Contentful enables organizations to build personalized experiences across multiple platforms. Contentful integrates with leading PIM and eCommerce platforms to handle all digital commerce needs.
• App Framework: Contentful’s App Framework lets brands easily connect tools and frameworks to the platform. Extending Contentful’s features is a simple process whether your business needs a traditional or bespoke solution. Developers can leverage open-source examples as blueprints for building apps of all types.
• Content Hub: Many enterprises suffer from content that is scattered in multiple locations. With Contentful’s content hub platform, that content can be unified to give editors more control over it. Contentful can also easily integrate that hub using webhooks and APIs to future-proof content and have it consumed anywhere.

Key Features of Contentful CMS

Contentful has some notable features that make it stand out from other CMS platforms:

• Structured Content Authoring: Content authors can structure content for any channel by creating custom content types, choosing fields, and arranging them in defined hierarchies. Contentful also boasts SEO support, content versioning for rollbacks and history, and a great archiving feature to safely retire content you’re not ready to delete but can’t have to go live again by accident. The CMS also offers content scheduling, a perfect solution for those 4 AM releases, and a thorough internal search feature for finding that one piece of content you forgot to label properly.
• Contentful Apps: Compose + Launch: Compose + Launch gives content teams the tools they need to create engaging experiences and collaborate. With Compose, content authors can utilize a page-based interface to create and manage content. This includes SEO fields and localization. With Launch, teams can collaborate more efficiently with content releases, flexible scheduling, and workflows.
• GraphQL: Contentful’s GraphQL Content API offers a GraphQL schema that can be used to consume published and unpublished content.
• WebHooks: Webhooks can send notifications when data is altered in Contentful, creating triggers that react to changes as required.

Learning Contentful CMS

For even the most experienced CMS users, working with a new CMS often comes with a steep learning curve. However, with Contentful, there is no learning curve at all, as both marketers and developers can easily leverage the headless nature of the CMS.

Contentful easily lends to its users, both backend and content authors. It gives the freedom to keep the same frontend and content models no matter which language, microsite, campaign site, or API you choose to run. This is amenable to creating and upkeeping a whole large-scale system of satellite sites that are not meant to connect but still benefit from the reusability of the core components that Contentful offers.

So, what does that mean? It means less training and a faster pick-up when a new site is created. Learning how to use Contentful is a straightforward process since it includes a built-in help center and training courses to get you started and keep you learning with advanced courses.

Launch Faster with a Contentful Partner

Customers in today’s environment are demanding engaging content experiences that span multiple channels. Enterprises hoping to deliver on those experiences need a CMS to empower their entire team, from developers to marketers.

Contentful has been regarded as one of the leading platforms in the headless CMS industry and can help organizations deliver what their customers need. At Content Bloom, our expertise as a Contentful partner and digital agency for the enterprise gives us the capability to assist with any Contentful implementation, omnichannel marketing, and more.

Want to get the most out of the Contentful platform? Reach out.

FAQ

What is a Contentful CMS?

Contentful is a headless CMS that provides a platform for storing, managing, and delivering content to various types of applications, including websites, mobile apps, and IoT devices. Unlike traditional CMS platforms that tightly couple content presentation with content management, Contentful offers a content infrastructure that allows developers to use APIs to deliver content to any device or channel. It focuses on the backend management of content, leaving the frontend presentation to be handled by the developers using the platform.

Is Contentful a good CMS?

Contentful is considered a good CMS for certain applications, especially where flexibility and scalability are important. It is particularly useful for organizations looking to deliver content across multiple platforms and devices. The API-driven approach of Contentful enables developers to customize how and where content is displayed, making it a strong choice for managing dynamic content in modern web and mobile applications. However, whether it is the best choice depends on specific project requirements, technical expertise, and integration needs.

What is the difference between CMS and headless CMS?

The main difference between a traditional CMS and a headless CMS lies in how they handle the presentation layer of content. A traditional CMS, like WordPress, typically includes front-end templates and themes that dictate how content is presented on websites. It manages both content creation and how that content is displayed.

On the other hand, a headless CMS, like Contentful, lacks a front-end layer (“head”) and strictly focuses on the back-end management and storage of content. It provides content as a service, which is accessible via APIs for display on any device or channel. This decoupling of content management from content presentation provides greater flexibility and control over how content is utilized across various platforms.

Is Contentful like WordPress?

While both Contentful and WordPress can be used as CMSs, they serve different purposes and are structured differently. WordPress is a traditional CMS that is often used for building websites with a built-in ability to manage the front-end presentation. It is known for its ease of use, extensive plugin ecosystem, and strong community support.

Contentful, however, is a headless CMS that focuses on managing content via an API, without providing front-end templates or themes. It requires more development expertise to set up but offers more flexibility in how and where your content can be displayed. This makes it more suitable for projects that need to serve content across multiple platforms and need a custom presentation layer that can adapt to various environments.

Each platform has its strengths, and the choice between them would depend on the specific needs and goals of a project.