Contentful, a content platform

Contentful is a content platform that offers a new approach to content management. Read this article to learn how it can transform your next project—and your software development workflow.

Contentful lets you manage all of the content in your stack—whether you are building a website, app or device.

What is a content platform?

The cloud has forever changed the way we build software. As a result, development teams are redesigning their software stacks to be more modular and more agile. Modern developers also have access to a new generation of cloud service providers that supply an infrastructure for analytics, email, SMS, authorization, payments, search, and so much more.

Despite this shift, content has been left behind. Content still gets trapped in some type of Content Management System (CMS), either purchased, open source or built in-house. Contentful isn't a CMS, Contentful is a content platform.

When you buy a CMS—whether traditional, headless or decoupled—you're buying a website first and foremost. And then you can customize it to meet your needs by using an assortment of included features and plug-ins with varying complexity and potential security concerns.

A content infrastructure, on the other hand, starts with the data model—or in this case, the structured content. And it is built to fit into modern software delivery pipelines connecting to workflows and services used by both your developers and content creators.

Code independence

Developers can have strong opinions on the best tool for the job. Perhaps you prefer Python over JavaScript? Or Ruby over PHP? But no matter what stack you prefer, content infrastructure has your back. We simply want you to be able to code in your favorite language without having to worry about the backend architecture.

Build a staging environment in no time

Contentful is designed to fit into your workflow. Our approach to treating content as a layer in your stack will help you to integrate content into your team’s deployment pipeline.

For example, Contentful allows you to separate content between staging and production environments via designated APIs.

How does Contentful’s work?

A key aspect of our content platform is our Content Delivery Network (CDN). The CDN ensures that your apps and your users have fast and reliable access to the content they need. You create great content — we make sure it arrives on time, every time.

It’s all about API calls

No matter what kind of content you use with our content platform, your content is always just an API call away. Be it text, images, VR objects or anything else that can be digitally represented. You grab it from our content hub with an API call.

It’s all JSON—both ways

You communicate with our content platform using any combination of our APIs:

• Content Delivery API

• Content Management API

• Content Preview API

• Images API

• GraphQL API

• User Management API

• SCIM API

All our APIs respond using JSON that you can integrate into any app or platform. You can also use JSON structured data to upload information and assets to our content infrastructure via the Content Management API.

Why is a content platform important?

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Our solution gives developers the ability to start small, using only what they need, and then confidently scale enterprise-wide with the success of their products.

Focus on code — not administration

Developers want to spend their time developing. Building apps and services that interact with our content platform is the modern way to free developers from the burdens of managing an old-school, monolithic CMS. Worrying about database architecture, uptime and scalability issues is now a thing of the past.

A content platform adds a layer of security

With a centralized and hosted solution like a content platform, you get an extra layer of protection. You no longer have to stay awake at night wondering if your CMS is adequately patched to keep hackers out.

We take care of keeping your content secure so that you can focus on building great apps. And in true HTTPS everywhere fashion, we serve content using encrypted connection right out of the box.

Try Contentful for free

Getting started with Contentful is both free and quick—just head over to the sign-up page and create your account. You can also read our features page to find out what our solution can do for your organization.