This is how we use Contentful at Rebel and Bird
Skriven av Matilda Johansson“In our development environment, where we work with Contentful, GatsbyJS, and React, we as developers can take things from start to finish. It makes me feel a huge potential in my work here”, says Robert Lundeqvist, developer at Rebel and Bird.
At Rebel and Bird, as we have written about previously, we have developed an overall technical framework for how we develop digital services quickly, cheaply, and stable. One of the central elements of that framework is the headless CMS Contentful.
We have interviewed Robert Lundeqvist to find out how Contentful works to work with as a developer. Robert has extensive experience working with CMS:s such as Episerver, Umbraco, and Sharepoint with clients such as Svenska Dagbladet, Marginalen Bank, and Kungsleden.
- In our set-up, where we work with Gatsby, Contentful, and React, as a developer, you can take things from start to finish by yourself. You can do anything. I set up a data model, set up sample data, access sample data via the API, and build the view that best fits, Robert says about Contentful.
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Contentful makes it possible for the developers themselves to extend the editor interface via UI Extensions. An advantage of the type of UI Extensions that you can build in Contentful using regular javascript is that they are easy to share internally and can thus be reused when needed, which is a valuable structural capital in the long-term work.
When Robert compares Contentful to other CMS:s, he points out how open it is.
- It's a data box with an editor interface and an API - simple and clear. I appreciate the flat structure, which gives a great deal of freedom in how you, as a developer, design the content solution. Another advantage is that the content is separated from the web solution. It is easy to move the content if you want to change the CMS, and it is straightforward to rebuild the site without having to replace the CMS.
But how should you, as a developer, think when working with Contentful?
- It's easy to think of the old schools CMS with many different page types. But here it is more important to see what is in common and then break out what is unique as separate content types, rather than page types. Take an article page and a calendar event as an example. They both have a title and a body text, and it's things like dates that set them apart. We have made it so that we have a single page type that can be filled with different building blocks. It is also good to think about the balance between the developer's opportunities and the editor's needs. A developer may want to break everything down into its smallest constituents, but you should not forget that it is central to create a workflow that is clear for editors.”
This article was initially published at www.rebelandbird.com on March 18, 2019.