Questions for Contentful

[hoosteeno]

• We have a general idea of our synchronization architecture that involves storing content retrieved from the (Sync? Content Delivery?) API in our own database, to ensure control over availability. We'd like to talk through it and hear how other clients have solved it.
• We're not exactly sure how to mesh that plan with the preview API (because our synch architecture implies some publish latency), and are curious how others have solved it.
• We're curious whether we need to plan for post-API image optimization, or whether Contentful optimizes images as part of normal management.
• We are designing for a system that has a hybrid localization plan. Groups of cards on the page are locale-specific, while other items on the page may be localized across all locales. In other words, we might have 5 cards in de, and in en-US, we might have 12 completely different cards, and in both locales there might be a global hero area above the cards. We're interested in how this is best accomplished.

[hoosteeno]

• We have a general idea of our synchronization architecture that involves storing content retrieved from the (Sync? Content Delivery?) API in our own database, to ensure control over availability. We'd like to talk through it and hear how other clients have solved it.

Contentful generally sees people using Sync for low-bandwidth situations, like a mobile app. When we have a dynamic on server approach, they recommend the Content Delivery API. They recommend using web hooks to watch for publishing events; the webserver will retrieve only the thing that was updated. Webhooks can be triggered with fine-grained config, and the payload can be customized (e.g. by including a list of the modified things for an integration script to retrieve).

Follow up: How can we learn that webhooks aren't firing, if there is some error? The webapp has an activity log to monitor the status of every webhook. The activity log may be accessible by API. Contentful will follow up with us on that.

[hoosteeno]

• We have a general idea of our synchronization architecture that involves storing content retrieved from the (Sync? Content Delivery?) API in our own database, to ensure control over availability. We'd like to talk through it and hear how other clients have solved it.

We'll use the same template, with a separate view that populates the template directly from Contentful rather than updating the database, and can trigger this with the preview button using the same integration scripting as our main content update.

We can also build out our own workflow in the Contentful UI that could e.g. put content cards right in the sidebar for realtime previews.

Customers have built full-page extensions in Contentful to build e.g. content calendars.

[hoosteeno]

• We're curious whether we need to plan for post-API image optimization, or whether Contentful optimizes images as part of normal management.

All binary assets are stored, served as-is, or modified by images API. There isn't an obvious way to optimize images in Images API right now. The "quality" parameter is an option -- we could lower image quality with filesizes > X.

Some clients integrate with a 3rd party service for more extensive DAM needs like Bynder or Cloudinary, which are really valuable to teams producing tons of assets (streaming video, etc). These can be seamlessly integrated into Contentful's UI so creators don't have to use 2 tools.

[hoosteeno]

• We are designing for a system that has a hybrid localization plan. Groups of cards on the page are locale-specific, while other items on the page may be localized across all locales. In other words, we might have 5 cards in de, and in en-US, we might have 12 completely different cards, and in both locales there might be a global hero area above the cards. We're interested in how this is best accomplished.

Contentful will send some custom locale docs. We may be able to build out a custom locale for our cards that we only use for these single-locale things like content cards or WNPs or similar.