HACKER Q&A
📣 bryanrasmussen

Anyone use an external tool to maintain contentful?


I'm finding the way our contentful environment has been set up to be less than enticing, in fact it feels like an unmaintainable swamp. This is probably our fault but we have a bunch of content that is simply 'boilerplate' to put other content together. I would like to do something to maintain this boilerplate outside contentful and wondering if anyone has had to do something like and written up their experiences, what tools were used etc.


  👤 vicentereig Accepted Answer ✓
Hey Bryan,

It'd be helpful if you could provide a couple of examples of that _boilerplate content_ looks like.

I led the team migrating to Contentful (CF) a hefty documentation website [1] from a homegrown CMS based on MDX. 600+ mdx articles, multiple GBs of media. This was about a year ago, so my knowledge might be outdated.

What worked for us was focusing our workflow as if CF were a database. I personally borrowed a bunch of concepts of how Rails' Active Record allows you, or your CI pipeline, to manage your database schema. Things like:

- have CF doing some gymnastics to keep track of migrations ran.

- supporting ephemeral CF environments so each developer could work without stepping on each others toes.

- promoting environments on PR merges

Being able to track changes in CF's schema through migrations, allowed us to build other useful stuff like:

- structuring articles in a way that the navigation under each section is not a pain to rebuild.

This might be what you mean when you talk about _boilerplate content_. Didn't find anything at the time, but it's possible that someone else has built a framework of sorts.

It took us a few weeks to prepare ours before working on actually migrating content. However, it supported our work along the way during the incremental and continuous migration we planned.

And then we were in a good spot to actually start migrating content. Transpiling the MDX to the JSON CF can ingest, uploading media assets, rewiring the UI (nextjs) to fetch contents from CF instead of the local MDX source.

Anyway, let me know if you want to bounce some ideas off. Contact details in my profile.

[1] https://tray.io/documentation/


👤 MH15
What is "contentful"?