Introduction to Third party orchestration

What is Third party orchestration?

Third party orchestration is a feature designed to boost digital teams and developer productivity. It connects content from third party systems and makes it available for delivery with Contentful through the GraphQL API. This helps teams spend less time developing integration layers and more time creating engaging digital experiences that scale.

The Third party orchestration feature addresses some of the most common problems when dealing with content in multiple platforms — retrieving it from each system and assembling it together in the right place for the right audience. 

There are two main concepts when referring to Third party orchestration:

• Sources — A source is any third party system that contains content you want to reference. Currently, they are through marketplace apps.

• Resolvers — A resolver is a backend function that runs on Contentful’s delivery infrastructure and performs the job of connecting to the source, fetching the content and returning it to delivery when requested.

With Third party orchestration we have four core components:

• Connect a third party system to Contentful by installing it from the Marketplace.

• Configure third party orchestration at content type level to enable resolving content on delivery and select which content is available for editors and delivery.

• Edit the content linked from the third party system directly in Contentful.

• Deliver the content from Contentful along with the third party content within a single API call.

Marketplace sources

You can enable Third party orchestration to resolve the content retrieved from the supported apps in our marketplace using the Contentful GraphQL API.

We currently support the integration of two ecommerce platforms with Third party orchestration:

• Shopify

• Commercetools —  through our Early Access Program (EAP)

Get started with Third party orchestration

To start using Third party orchestration:

1. Install the ecommerce app of your choice from our marketplace into your organization.

2. Log in to the Contentful web app and select the Resolve content on delivery check box in the field editor of the content type with the commerce app field setup. Without this setting enabled, Contentful won’t fetch content from the third party source.

3. If you already have the app set up, adjust your queries to our GraphQL API to request the additional product information from the ecommerce provider. For more details on how to adjust your queries, see the Third party orchestration page in the developer documentation.

For more information on how to get started with the marketplace app of your choice, see the official documentation.