Contentful: Benefits of Switching to this Growing CMS today

WordPress is a popular content management system (CMS) that has been around for nearly 10 years. Further, most people think of WordPress when the word CMS is mentioned because it has a broad user base, and its developer community is passionate about what they are doing. So WordPress is a giant, and every CMS is compared with it.

Drupal is another growing CMs that many content creators and developers appreciate. It’s also open-source, just like WordPress and puts into production through a self-hosted approach.

On the other hand, Contentful has more than the present CMS capabilities for it’s an API-centric content management platform. So it’s very easy to get your stored content in Contentful into your app or other platforms.

What is Contentful?

It’s a content infrastructure that allows you to create, manage and distribute your content to multiple channels, mobile apps, websites or other platforms like infinity and Google Glass using RESTful APIs. You get total freedom to create a content model that allows you to manage whatever content you want.

The platform was designed for people with or without a technical background. Therefore you work as an editor or content strategist without writing code in Contentful. However, you have to create code when you want to deliver your content outside this platform or even work with a freelancer or an agency that will help you create a mobile app or website as well as other experiences depending on your content.

CMS is centralized to a single content they are optimized to display, mostly a website. So instead of being general content management systems, most CMSs are just simple web publishing tools. For instance, they provide pre-existing content models which limit the possibilities and are extremely coupled to a single presentation layer.

Contentful has a three-step process which comprises of:

• State a content model independent from the presentation layer that describes the type of content you intend to manage.
• Manage your content in an interactive editing interface
• Display the content in a presentation-independent way while you can still create engaging experiences around it

Based on the three-step process, Contentful is entirely adapted to your needs and can create and manage your content online using this efficient tool and uncluttered user interface.

Further Contentful supports browsers such as Google Chrome, Opera, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge and Apple Safari but not mobile browsers. Also, the platform supports two most recent versions and a previous one for six months after the release of a new version.

Additionally, Contentful allows you to manage content such as text, images, video, music, code or structured documents.

Features That Make Contentful Special

Content Infrastructure: its Content Delivery Network (CDN) delivers content to your users 24/7.

Flexible content models: It has no pre-defined content models.

Uncluttered UI: The platform has a beautiful and simple user interface because Contentful is concerned about the author experience.

Mobile, web and other platforms on the same system: You can deliver your content to all platforms as soon as you publish using its API.

How does Contentful compare to WordPress and Drupal?

Benefits

Contentful: Content and visual presentation are clearly separated, and it’s API-based from the ground up.

WordPress: Easily deployed for simple projects. It has self-hosting possibilities and endless themes that give you a modern look.

Drupal: it’s an open source and also easy to deploy for small projects.

Considerations

Contentful: Installation can’t be done locally, and you also need a developer.

WordPress: You should apply security updates correctly, and the platform was built with website content in mind.

Drupal: You need a reliable hosting provider before getting started. It’s not API-centric from the ground up.

Benefits of Using Contentful

1. It has extensive caching as well as multiple redundancies that ensure fast delivery of content. Thus nearly 98% of the content will be delivered from the cache when the entire redundancies of your delivery infrastructure fail.
2. The platform has real-time content editing capability that enhances team collaboration. You can easily import your content from any source with its robust API and custom scripts. That means you can make and update the content and content models through the management API.
3. The platform doesn’t lock users in a specific architecture or pre-defined model; instead, it leaves that to the professional developer. Contentful gives freedom which you can use to create apps for iOS, Android or any other platform.