Weighing up the weaknesses and strengths of any technology is a key component in deciding whether to use it, continue using it, or identifying areas for its improvement – especially if it’s a technology that you really like or that you use regularly, because it’s always better to shake off the delusions of perfection and confront the not so good as well as the good.
Today we’re weighing the content management system of Contentful.
Instead of lofty or generalized comments on the CMS, the following critique comes from the very people who use Contentful on a regular basis: ArganoUV’s very own developers (although we’ve kept them anonymous to keep their identities top secret).
Strengths
Let’s start out with the strengths of the content management system as judged by our developers.
“With Contentful, you get a nice and intuitive user interface. But more than that, it has great support for multiple areas. For example, when it needs to be used by different teams or if it needs to be used by different projects.”
“Among the many CMS’s that I’ve had experience working with over the years, Contentful is probably the most successful at providing a robust space for digital content.”
“It gives us well-organized data models that are also flexible. And it also supports multiple data types as well as content editors.”
“Contentful has an awesome built-in versioning feature that has history and draft parts so that it’s easy to do updates or redo certain parts that need to be reverted.”
“The clean interface is one of the best parts of Contentful. It’s so clean and uncluttered and makes it easier for us to just focus on the content – pure and simple.”
“One of my favorite parts of the system is that it is very flexible; you can really extend it to provide more dynamic content.”
Weaknesses
Now we can move on to pull out some of the weaknesses of the content management system.
“One of the less optimal parts of the content system is that the internal search is lacking in functionality.”
“It seems that Contentful is great at managing new projects but for legacy projects, importing previous content doesn’t run so smoothly.”
“I know it’s a minor thing but the pages could be better represented visually when it comes to relating elements together.”
“I think it would be great if CLI wasn’t necessary for Contentful branches, as it can be impractical for non-CLI users.”
“If there was a way to migrate data between different areas – such as staging, production, etc. – I think that would be a good step.”
PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Contentful consultancies. Contact us to see how we can work together.
