Contentful is a headless, API-centric content management system that is geared towards the mobile experience. This content delivery method is through RESTful JSON-based API. This makes it relatively easy to get content from the back-end and display it.
Contentful is used by many of the world’s largest and most well-known brands. And we’re going to be looking at a handful of them. So let’s take a look.
Nasty Gal
“With Contentful we are set up to process a volume and quality of content that just wasn’t possible before,” said Gareth Ballester, the senior web developer at Nasty Gal. Their switch to Contentful made them realize that the modular approach let them handle their content once, and only once, rather than repeating content across different platforms and languages.
It features an easy-to-use interface, allowing their dev team to now hand over the responsibility of publishing and editing content to the creative team, so that they can devote more of their time on creating scalable processes.
“Contentful is forcing us to think about content in a more abstract way,” said Royce Hsu, the UX developer. “We’ve gotten our product people onto this way of thinking too, which makes it that much easier to work together.”
Playboy
Another (in)famous brand on the list is Playboy, launched by the (in)famous and late Hugh Hefner around six decades ago. Playboy, today, is a media company that produces across TV, online, and print as well as across apps and websites. And Playboy, today, relies on Contentful to provide smooth and quick publication of content tied to entertainment and lifestyle.
“We host, encode, and serve our videos from the Ooyala video platform,” said Rachel Melville, the senior director of product management at Playboy. “Being able to search for and preview these videos without even leaving my content editor has dramatically simplified our workflow.”
In fact, many of the issues that Playboy was facing have now been solved through the out-of-the-box features that are found in the CMS of Contentful. These include the simplification of asset importing, carrying out external integrations, and built-in tools for fast image editing.
ASICS
“We wanted to move to a robust, flexible platform that would help us easily manage content,” said Pauk Baron, the managing partner at ASICS. “Contentful matched all our criteria and we found working with the system to be very straightforward.
“But where Contentful really surpassed our expectations was when our client team at ASICS started using it and got up to speed in no time.”
Within the same platform, ASICS is able to accommodate different types of content. For example, its marathon app involves geo-tagged data and merchandisable images. Alternative content management systems, and more popular ones, like WordPress, do provide easy interfaces yet adapting them to support in-app content proves difficult.
And perhaps more importantly, applying these improvements for each new version of the app equals adding bucket-loads of technical debt to the project. “Replicating our app’s complex content model in Contentful was a crucial test to check how flexible and scalable the platform was,” added Paul.
Red Bull
The drink that gives you wings. The brand also powers its content and accelerates its publications using Contentful. More specifically, the Red Bull Music Academy implemented Contentful to deliver diverse specifications for its promotional websites.
“While we use a very versatile front-end framework, our legacy CMS imposed hard constraints on the type of features we could develop,” said James Singleton, one of its web developers. Now, creating and publishing content on Contentful has had significant improvements. “Today,” said Niklas Jansean, product manager, “we launch a site in a third of the time it used to take and we can afford to be bold, to come up with designs that have a distinctive personality.”
PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Contentful consultancies. Contact us to see how we can work together.
