Contentful 101 Flashcards
(62 cards)
1
Q
What is an API?
A
Application Programmimg Interfaces: Allows a product/service to talk to another product/service. Also used to give people access to your data/resources from outside your firewall.
2
Q
What are the benefits of Contentful API?
A
- Allow integration with 3rd parties
- Developers can get data in and out of Contentful platform using API calls.
3
Q
What are the 4 APIs and their access?
A
- Management (read & write access to entries)
- Delivery (read-onlly access to entries
- Preview (preview unpublished entries)
- Images (ad-hoc transformation)
4
Q
What is a webhook?
A
Push notification (on email or slack for example) when a change or action is triggered
5
Q
What does the Management API do?
A
- CMA - is not meant for use in production scenarios.
- Read and write access
- Model content
- Manage entries
- Powers the web app
- Uses different key
6
Q
What does the Preview API do?
A
CPA
- acts exactly the same as the CDA
- Shows published and draft content
- Use it for staging / QA
- Works like CDA (uses different key)
7
Q
Tell me about the Delivery API do?
A
CDA is an incredibly fast read-only api for accessing your content in production
- Read-only
- Only shows published content
- High performance
- High availability
Content is delivered as JSON data, and images, videos and other media as files. The API is available via a globally distributed content delivery network (CDN).
8
Q
What does the image API do?
A
Allows for you to manipulate your images on the fly. You can access it with the same API key you use for the CDA.
- Delivers assets
- Offers image resizing, cropping, framing, etc
- Uses the CDA api key
9
Q
What does API-centric mean?
A
This means Developer get your data in and out of the Contentful platform using API calls. This is what makes Contentful a headless and decoupled solution for managing content.
10
Q
What are the benefits to a modular approach?
A
Flexibility - Makes content reusable on any device. Creates building blocks so that content can be easily shuffled around depending on the presentation format
11
Q
What is a presentation layer?
A
Displays the content to the visitor’s device/channel
12
Q
What are pros about legacy solutions?
A
- Very easy to use for adding and updating content (esp. for non technical users)
- Requires no coding
- Templetes galore
- Customization via themes
- For those that want a hosted solution
13
Q
What are the cons about legacy solution?
A
- Page-Centric: Never meant to leave website so content is not responsive to other devices
- Monolitic core makes it hard to integrate and upgrade
- Single server does not allow for scalability and distribution
- Tightly couples content with presentation layer
14
Q
What are the pros about full-stack CMS
A
Robust feature set, all in one solution (swiss army knife)
15
Q
What are the cons about full-stack CMS
A
- Tightly couples content & presentation layer
- Swiss army knife, does a little bit of everything okay but not excellent
- Limiting developers to stack
- No flexibility to integrate with other apps
16
Q
Why is cloud service is better than single server?
A
- Scalability
- No single point of failure
17
Q
Explain Contentful’s cloud infrastructure
A
Our cloud infrastructure has a split architecture -
Management side and Delivery side. Everything is stored on AWS. Contentful is a content hub allowing users to author things in draft mode. As soon as its published it is pushed out into our delivery infrastructure. This is where you can point any presentation layer. CDN…..
18
Q
Explain Contenful’s Web App
A
Users can define their content model, work on entries, edit images, manage access credentials and perform other content-related tasks, and a set of stateless APIs enabling users to interact with content programmatically
19
Q
How is Contentful taking a different approach to traditional CMSes?
A
-Modular - Built to make content reusable and channel independent
-Microservice - API-driven design allows powerful integrations with third parties
-Cloud service- Decoupled and scalable management and delivery of content
shared with one person, off - only specific people can access
*Content is stored in pure form, stripped from any presentation mark up or business logic and encoded as JSON doc
20
Q
What is JSON?
A
JSON is a way of sharing data (usually between the browser and a server).
- It stores data in an easy-to-read manner for both humans and programs
- It is labeled as a “data interchange format” because you will see it used as an intermediary to move data between one program and another
21
Q
Benefits of JSON?
A
It is light-weight, contains metadata about the type of values stored in individual fields and enforce type validations giving precise content
22
Q
Why does Contentful use JSON?
A
JSON is a text format that is completely language independent but uses conventions that are familiar to programmers of the C-family of languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, and many others. These properties make JSON an ideal data-interchange language
23
Q
Who should not use Contentful?
A
Companies with small dev team who want
- to put up a quick web-page
- templating
- to host content on their server
- out of the box solution
24
Q
Who should use Contentful
A
Companies that
- are early adopters
- want competitive advantage
- embrace micro-service architecture
- manage data in a structured content.
- have developers who want customization (don’t mind crafting applications designed to fetch data from Contentful and built their way)
- want flexibility to reuse structured content on any device/channel
25
What are the benefits of Contentful?
-Freedom to build applications without being severely limited by the underlying platform.
-Decoupling
--content (better content management system) and presentation layer (allow flexibility to choose and use better tools for rendering the presentation layer)
--editorial team dependency on dev team since
straightforward interface allows non-techies o easily publish content whenever they want
--on the infrastructure level. If the management segment fails, the delivery tier is still up
-Integrated (via API) content management solution which will blend seamlessly into the rest of business’s software architecture
-helps users to organize and structure their content more freely
26
Cons for Contentful
Quite a bit of development to get started because there's no presentation layer. (Ex: Need to do a bit of work to get things like meta tags, canonical tags, sitemaps, social sharing tags, business logic set up)
27
What CDNs do we use, what is their purpose?
- Fastly for JSON
| - Cloudfrond + 2 variable (CDN77, Akamai, KeyCND, MaxCDN) for assets/images
28
How do we secure Contentful's APIs?
By default we use SSL (Secure Socket Layer)/TLS (Tranport Layer Security (TLS) for both CMA & CDA so all requests are encrypted (using AES - Advanced Encryption Standard)
29
How does Contentful secure/protect it's infrastructure?
Using a firewall (Incapsula web application) infront of the critical piece of our infrasturcture. The fire wall detects and mitigates all types of DDoS attacks and filters the bot traffic. We perform automated and manual security tests to identify any potential security vulneratbility in our app. We also contract external vendors to perfrom penetration and vulnerability tests on our production systems. Any findings and recommendations are evaluated by security personnel and appropriate action is taken.
shared with one person, off - only specific people can access.
30
What is S3?
Amazon Simple Storage Service where user created documents are stored within Amazon
31
What is RDS
Amazon Relational Database Service (ARDS) where organization and user-specific data is stored in a PostgreSQL database run by ARDS
32
What is the SLA guarantee for S3 and RDS?
Both storage, designed to ensure high availability and reliability.
- S3 guarantees 99.99& and 99.999999999% durability of objects over a year.
- RDS 99.95% availability/month.
33
How does Amazon achieve their SLA
Amazon S3 redundantly stores objects on multiple devices across multiple facilities in the S3 Region.
34
Name different channels and touch points
Websites, microsites, intranet, print, email, social, apps, blogs,
35
What is structured content?
Structured content is content separated into independent parts, making its behavior more predictable.
The independent parts are often labeled "fields" in the context of a CMS, but are commonly called "chunks" by content strategists. Because these parts are separate entities, they can be edited independently, and used in different contexts.
Fields for a blog post may include: blog post title, author name, author job title, author organization, blog post description and so on. By structuring your content, you can take advantage of a CMS to draw semantic relationships between pieces of content, reuse your content and much more.
{Example: A structure for a cooking recipe could include the following fields: the name of the recipe, the author, the ingredients, the instructions, a short description of the recipe, a gallery of images and the categorization of the recipe (sweet, vegetarian, vegan, gluten free...). If we structure our recipe content, we can semantically link a recipe to its ingredients. In turn, we can easily suggest to the user a list of recipes that contain a specific ingredient. This would not be possible if the content was just a blob without any structure.}
By keeping the content on your website properly organized, your company possesses an immense competitive advantage.
36
What are the benefits of structured content
COPE - Create once publish everywhere.
- Lessens the burden on the editorial team
- Ensures steady flow of content across all channels
- creates more touch points with your customers.
37
How can you monetize with structured content?
You can provide various levels of access to your content.
(Example: A magazine article may be presented in its summary abstract form for free and in entirety to paying users. Or perhaps the text of an article is free and the accompanying video is a paid item)
Structured content gives great flexibility to your content strategy and provides innovative ways to maintain engagement on your site as well as capture revenue.
38
How can structured content simplify translation process?
For an international brand, being efficient means having the ability to reuse the same content in different languages. We all know the translation process can be time consuming. By having your content structured, management of translations becomes streamlined and enhances the editor's experience. It also ensures localized content follows the same format as the original content. By implementing a CMS with a flexible content model, you’re able to set up translated content easily and even though the language is different, the presentation will be consistent and any original assets such as images can easily be reused (unless images will be localized as well, of course)
39
How does structured content enable readers to discover information more easily?
Discovery is an important part of the content consumption experience. By having your content structured, you can provide taxonomy-based search navigation for your users and allow them to dig deeper into related media. They select categories of interest to browse content, or search for a term first and use the categories to filter the search results.
40
How does structured content help with personalization?
One of the most advantageous aspects of adaptive content is the ability to provide intelligent and personalized marketing. When your content is structured appropriately, your website can be optimized to deliver specific content to a target audience. You might be a bookseller and would like to present recommended books based on a user’s browsing history. When your content is structured appropriately, you can easily recommend other books by an author or in a specific genre, for example.
41
Contentful has SDKs for what languages?
JavaScript, Node.js, Ruby, PHP, Swift, Obj-C, Java, Andriod, cURL
42
What are the cons for single server?
- Not scalable
- Maintain yourself which can take time and be costly
- Single point of failure
43
Cons of Legacy CMS
- Page-centric - Content never meant to leave the website
- All-in-one - Monolithic core and customizations make it hard to integrate and upgrade
- Single server - Architected to run on one individual server instead of a scalable distributed cloud
44
What is Contentful's approach?
- Modular - Built to make content reusable and channel independent
- Microservice - API-driven design allows powerful integrations with third parties
- Cloud service- Decoupled and scalable management and delivery of content
45
What is the difference between headless and decoupled?
A Headless CMS is reactive — it manages content, then just sits and waits for some process to ask for it. A developer must therefore build the website herself, and then use API of the headless CMS to pull in the content
A Decoupled CMS is proactive, preparing content for presentation and pushing it into the specified delivery environment of your application. A decoupled system concerns itself with what happens in the delivery environment. It usually has some concept of a templating system with editorial tools. Contentful will deliver the content as JSON and will be globally devourable by any internet-connected device
46
What are use cases for headless CMS
- Websites and web apps that use JavaScript frameworks such as React, AngularJS, and VueJS.
- Mobile apps.
- Websites built using static site generator.
- Ecosystems of apps and websites where the same content gets published in many places.
47
How can Contentful imrpove SEO?
- We give you the meta data capabiliites to improve your SEO stragetgies, its up to the customer to come up with metadata tag architecture to impact SEO results. We give you tools to make SEO better but cant do it for you. Create SEO field, put tags on a website, set up content type for SEO tags and business people (SEO) these page should be tagged with these things. preset dropdowns, contentful lets you format fields as a tag field.
- Search engines being way smarter these days than they used to be The best SEO there is – the content itself. That being said, Contentful can be used to manage seo-related metadata such as html page keywords, meta:description and even urls. They just need to be modeled as fields and filled out by the editors. Then the frontend code can simply pull in and display that information.
48
What are Content Management tokens?
To access the content management API and store content created in your apps, you need a content management token that represents the desired account of your user. This token will have the same rights as the owner of the account. There are two types of content management tokens which you can use:
Personal access tokens - Use if you're using the content management API to access data from your own Contentful user account
OAuth tokens - Use if you're building a public integration that requests access to other Contentful user's data
49
What is an API Key?
Authentication needed when clients make request. It is created per space and you can create an access token using the Contentful web app or Content Management API
50
What is a space?
In the Contentful world, a space is a data bucket used to store the content that will later appear inside your apps. Like a database table, content is described and stored using a data model. A key feature is that you get to define the data model yourself to fit your needs.
51
What is a content model?
contains content types you create
52
What are content types?
are Product, Brand , Categories which have fields that you can define (text , number, date and time, location, media, boolean, JSON object, Reference )
53
What are the properties of these content types?
* Product - name, price, color, type, dimensions
* Brand - name, image, address,
* Categories - thumbnails
54
Describe the relationship of Brands, Products and Categories?
References: Product to Brand - one to one (ex: shoe belongs to one brand, Nike)
Product to Categories - one to many (ex: shoe could be categories shoes, sportswear)
55
What are assets?
Assets: Binary files, connect through content model through reference or links (usually a picture of a the brand, product & category)
56
What are records?
It is an asset or an entry (consist of structured fields)
57
What are the different roles and their permissions?
Admin - Can do everything, including work with entries, create and update content types, configure space settings and work with API keys
Developer - Can only read entries and assets, create and update API keys
Editor - Can work with entries, does not have access to content types, API keys or space settings
Author - Can do everything an editor can do except for deleting, (un)publishing, (un)archiving entries
Freelancer - Can work only with his own entries, can't see the content of other people, can't (un)publish, (un)archive his own entries
Translator - Can only work in the assigned language, can't create, delete, (un)publish, (un)archive any entries
58
Is a monolithic CMS better than a headless CMS?
The answer is – it depends on your needs. There are use cases where one CMS type is better than the other. Having to create the website part of a CMS-based solution may seem like more work. And some may say "working with a single software is simpler than working with two", or "building a front-end is hard and time-consuming". These are fair points, and they do apply to a variety of cases.
59
Benefits of headless
- Flexibility - A headless CMS is a good choice if you feel limited by the front-end restrictions of a standard CMS. Rich web apps, custom layouts, and JavaScript frameworks don't quite fit into the architecture of a CMS which closely controls how content looks. To keep development simple it's better to have a clean setup from the beginning.
- Mobile/Other Channels - It's not only for websites, though. A headless CMS usually delivers content through an API, which means that it can deliver content anywhere, on any device. This is great news for mobile app developers, because with this approach the same backend can deliver content to an iOS app, an Android app, or any other medium.
- Better UX - A headless CMS is good for cross-platform publishing and custom user experiences. It makes publishers, designers, and developers happy, who in turn will provide great products for their users.
60
Name 3 static site generators Contentful works with?
- Middleman is a Ruby based static site generator, and this plugin will help you manage your
- Jekyll is a Ruby based static site generator, and this plugin pulls content from Contentful.
- Metalsmith is a JavaScript based static site generator, and this plugin fetches and renders data from Contentful.
61
What is an SQL?
Structured Query Language. SQL is used to communicate with a database.
62
What is a static site generator?
A static site is a collection of pages contained in basic HTML files. ... A static site generator (SSG) is a compromise between using a hand-coded static site and a full CMS. You generate an HTML-only website using raw data (such as Markdown files) and templates.
