Developer newsletter
Published on February 8, 2021
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You won't believe it, but we had snow here in Berlin, Germany! Why's that a big deal? I haven't seen the city covered in white for years. It was beautiful to see the usually grumpy Berliners get excited about some frozen water.
I hope you all had a good start to the year and are ready for a full round of excellent Contentful and community resources.
Shall we? Let's do it!
We code live!
Every Tuesday at 8:00 a.m. PT / 11:00 a.m. ET / 5:00 p.m. CET, our DevRel team and guests hang out on YouTube Live and Twitch to talk about GraphQL, Contentful tools and web development.
The last livestreams were all about GitHub Actions. Dive into code automation and CI/CD pipelines with these two recordings:
We also have exciting topics lined up for February and March:
Follow us on YouTube or Twitch to receive updates when we go live. See you there!
Do you have any projects we should build live? Let us know by replying to this email!
Exciting things from the internet
4 ways to use Axios interceptors
You might know that our JavaScript SDK uses Axios to be usable in the browser and Node.js. Our engineer Khaled has a detailed look at Axios' interceptor feature and describes four ways to use it.
Rust/WebAssembly on AWS Lambda@Edge (CloudFront)
Another excellent post from our Contentful engineers! Currently, it's not possible to run Rust in serverless functions at the edge. Christoph describes how you can run Rust code by using WebAssembly in Node.js. Is it possible to be more cutting-edge? I don't think so!
Progressive web apps in 2021
Progressive web apps (PWAs) have been around for a while now. When this technology entered the stage, I was sceptical and wondered if I will be able to write mobile apps that feel native with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. As usual, the answer is "it depends." If you want to learn more about the current state of progressive web apps, this extensive post by Maximiliano Firtman is worth a read (and bookmark)!
Contentful community
Monthly community hangouts
It's time for another round of community online meetups! Once a month, the community comes together on YouTube and Twitch to share what's new in the Contentful community. We cover the changelog and community members' projects.
This month, we'll learn about contentmodel.io (more about that below), a custom Contentful repeater app and Typescript type generation based on a Contentful's GraphQL schema.
Everything takes place in two time zones on February 24:
Mark your calendars, friends. We’re excited!
If you want to present something, we’d love to give you the stage! Let us know by filling out this form if you’d like to give a talk about web development in general, or about something you built using Contentful.
Discover and share content models on contentmodel.io
Content modeling can be challenging. A reusable and scalable content model depends on your project and your editorial requirements. Luckily there is a new community resource that allows anyone to share their content models. Let me introduce it to you: Hello contentmodel.io! 👋
You can browse existing Contentful content models, export them, share yours and even import content models created by others. This project is fantastic work!
Contentful corner
The App Framework turns one year old and we will celebrate it with a webinar!
Our App Framework turns one year old in February! 🎉 If you haven't had the chance to play around with it, no biggie. We will celebrate its birthday with a webinar on February 24. Join us, learn about the framework and ask all your questions.
Disclaimer: bring your party hats to the webinar. We will get some cake and swag to give away, too!
GraphQL via HTTP in five ways: cURL, Python, JavaScript, Ruby and PHP
The beauty of GraphQL is that you don't need to install any tooling to use it. Shy described how to consume our GraphQL API in five programming languages. If you think it's time to jump onto the GraphQL train, this post shows you how to get started!
"Thing of the day": a microblog without the use of any framework
We have a new DevRel team member! Everybody, say Hello to Salma!
If you want to learn more about her, she introduced herself on our blog.
And while she's busy learning all things Contentful, she built her first Contentful project! If you want to start microblogging but haven’t found the time to set up a complex project, have a look at "How to build a lightweight microblogging site with Contentful and vanilla HTML, CSS and JavaScript." I promise you, it's very low maintenance. Forget about Twitter — you can set up your microblog in just a few minutes!
We'll be joining our friends at Gatsby Conf on March 3
Gatsby is running a free conference, and the lineup is solid! We’ll be around on day two with a workshop to get you started with Gatsby and Contentful. The goal of the workshop: to build an Instagram clone so that you can start sharing your best pictures with the world. I can't wait to see all your photos!
Did you know that our rich text editor supports Slash-Commands? Press / to embed entries and assets in your rich text fields without leaving your keyboard. I love it!
Changelog
Our development teams started out the year very strongly. Take a look at the Contentful developer changelog to learn what's new. These features are my highlights:
Webhook header transformations
It's now possible for custom header values to include data from the original webhook payload.
The web app got a visual refresh!
You might have noticed, Contentful got a visual refresh. Find a before and after comparison in the changelog.
App SDK released
We released a new app SDK (@contentful/app-sdk) to reduce the confusion caused by building apps using the UI Extensions SDK (contentful-ui-extensions-sdk). Don't worry, there are no plans to diverge the two and you can replace one with the other in your existing apps.
Entry support for JSON Patch updates
It is now possible to send JSON patch updates via the PATCH resource when updating an entry via the Content Management API.
Search for entire phrases using double quotes
When searching Contentful content, it is now possible to search for entire phrases by wrapping the relevant part of the search query with double quotes (e.g. "this is a phrase").
Stay safe, and talk with you next month!
And that's it for February. Visit our developer portal to stay up to date. It includes developer blog posts, videos and our newsletter. Let us know via Slack or Twitter how we can continue to help you make awesome things.
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