Blog editor tells all: “My 7 favorite Contentful features”

Indulge me for a moment while I don a smoking jacket and slippers and reminisce. I’ve been what you might call a “marketing professional” for many years. In that yawning stretch of time, I’ve had the opportunity to work with a wide variety of content management systems (CMSes).

I’ve dabbled with Drupal. Wrangled with WordPress. Tinkered with Tumblr, and hacked away at Hubspot. I’ve also used the basic tools of HTML, CSS, and FTP to build websites by hand, and messed about with JAMstack, too. 

So, for what it’s worth, you can trust my opinion when it comes to managing, editing and publishing content online.

Today, I use Contentful. It’s been my daily driver for several years while managing this blog (thanks for visiting, by the way). In its earliest iteration, Contentful was a headless CMS. Now, it’s a digital experience platform (DXP). While the labels may change, I can tell you what hasn’t: For content editors, Contentful remains a joy to use.

In no particular order, I’m going to rattle off some of my favorite Contentful features. If any spark your curiosity, then my work here is done. And, hey, you’re totally welcome to contact our friendly sales teams for a personalized demonstration of any — or all — of the entries on this list. Tell 'em Bulent sent ya.

1. Live Preview

Let’s start with an easy one. Live Preview is a nifty Contentful feature that straddles the line between a static preview of your content and a space for making fine adjustments before you hit that publish button.

It’s not earth-shatteringly revolutionary but sometimes (often) a blog post is just a blog post, and all we editors want is an effective, convenient way to verify that our content appears as it should before it goes live — and be able to quickly revise it if it doesn’t.

The extensibility of Contentful is such that Live Preview isn’t your only option for previewing content. Vercel, for example, has its own preview feature, and Draft Mode is also decent. But as a baseline support for daily work, Live Preview is all I’ve ever needed.

2. Launch

I’m just getting warmed up — let’s talk about the Launch app. 

Raise your hand if you’ve ever had to publish multiple web pages against a hard deadline. Maybe you needed to support a product launch, or content migration project, or a seasonal marketing campaign. 

In those situations, you may need to publish tens or even hundreds of pages within a very narrow window of time. That’s a perfect storm for stress and blunder, especially if your team of editors are tired, overworked, and not communicating effectively.

The official Contentful Launch app is your friend in these scenarios. Using the app, you can still make edits (major and minor) to individual pieces of content prior to release — but, rather than having to publish them one by one, you can group them into batches for coordinated release. 

In other words, once you’re done editing your copy and images, everything within a designated batch goes live at your chosen time, simultaneously. Launch is simple, useful, and effortless. 

3. AI Actions

AI Actions is the newest feature on this list, but it’s quickly become essential. 

This may be hard to believe, but the job of a blog editor is not all swashbuckling adventure. There are plenty of boring, repetitive tasks involved: adding alt tags to images, for example, or cobbling together SEO metadata descriptions. 

The AI Actions feature in Contentful is unbelievably useful. To use it, you pick an AI Action from a menu of preconfigured actions or, alternatively, create your own. You then make the action available to select fields in your space — and a diamond icon will appear indicating that it’s been added successfully. With that done, you can click on the diamond whenever you need it to work its automated magic. 

I found a particularly useful application of AI Actions when we were migrating hundreds of blog posts into a new space. The headlines for this new content library were all in title case, which doesn’t align with our house style guide. To fix them would require slogging through each post, headline by headline, making manual adjustments. Who's got time for that? The solution was to create an AI Action which could adjust individual headlines from title case to sentence case with the click of a button, while I reviewed each entry.

To paraphrase Kent Brockman, avuncular anchorman from The Simpsons: “I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.”

Or to be less glib about it, AI tools like these are nothing to lose sleep over. They’re copilots for our daily work. And thanks to AI Actions, I can outsource mundane tasks and spend more time writing pithy copy like this.

4. Workflows

User governance is a standard feature in Contentful, vis-a-vis determining the access credentials of individual users for the creation, editing, publishing, or (gasp!) deletion of content. For that extra layer of security, we have Workflows, a content governance app that enables users to create processes and checkpoints in order to safely guide the production of your content. 

How do you use Workflows? Let’s say you have a super-sensitive piece of content on your site, like a press release, and it absolutely must not go live before the embargo is lifted. The wrinkle is that you still need to stage the thing ahead of time, and there’s the risk that someone hits the big green “publish” button by accident.

So, what are your options? You can’t wait until the last minute to stage and publish the content — that way lies madness. Fortunately, with Workflows, it’s as simple as locking content from publication until it’s been reviewed by the designated stakeholder, and a specific publication date is set. 

5. Ecosystem extensibility

Perhaps I’m biased, but the Contentful Marketplace is an embarrassment of riches, especially for content editors who want to offer more compelling experiences to their readers. 

As part of the inherent flexibility of an API-first architecture (where APIs function as a secure digital handshake between different services), you can activate a huge number of integrations within Contentful without compromising the performance of your digital domains.

The Marketplace has tools for localization, search, digital asset management, analytics, personalization, and — of course — artificial intelligence. 

An elegant example of a Marketplace integration at work is Wistia, a video platform that we use for the Contentful blog. We host and manage our video library in a separate Wistia account, and embedding videos into posts is only ever a click away. Individual video players can also be quickly customized for things like default volume, pop-ups, title cards, and so on.

Ah, here’s a convenient example:

6. Structured content

The heart, or perhaps I should say soul, of Contentful’s powerful content management features, is structured content. 

Now, at this juncture, some editors might be running away screaming, hands over their ears — but hear me out. Structured content isn’t some radical concept that only a chess grandmaster can understand. It’s actually been around since the early noughties, when publishers in the travel and legal sectors were actively applying it to their backlists.

The idea behind structured content is that, by breaking content down into its component parts — words, headings, pictures, metadata, and so on — owners are freed up to repurpose if for more than one application. We're essentially turning content into building blocks, which are classified by content type, and which can be reconfigured to form new pieces of content.

For example, let’s say we have a travel guide: That content might have began as a printed book, but, by structuring the content, those individual elements could be assembled differently, so that they could also manifest as a website, app, ebook, digital signage, audiobook, and more.

You wouldn't even need to use them as a travel guide, you could put them together in an entirely different configuration, to support a different content project.

The earliest problem that content creators had with structured content was being able to apply it at the point of production. Editors and designers using the traditional tools of their trade found that it distracted them from their daily work — it slowed them down and made them less effective. 

Today that problem is solved with Contentful and the composable revolution. Beneath the WYSIWYG interface is a powerful and versatile headless CMS; that’s a big reason why I love using it every day.

7. The FUTURE

One more feature I enjoy about Contentful. While the core functionality of the Contentful platform is robust and dependable, it never stands still. Our products are continually evolving to meet the needs of our valued customers and partners.

I know from speaking with our product managers, for example, that many customers absolutely adore the taxonomy features we’ve rolled out. These tools allow editors to label and organize content in ways that align with the natural language and mental models of their users — rather than forcing users to adapt to an unfamiliar system. This is a capability that can only result in better content.

As a blog editor, meanwhile, I’m excited about the opportunity to use more tools for localization, AI, and personalization, all of which are going to deliver more engaging experiences to our readers over the long term.

Wrapping up

So. Those are my favorite features when using Contentful, written from my humble perspective as this blog’s editor. I couldn’t possibly cover every aspect of the platform in a single post (that’s what the rest of this website is for), but I managed to narrow it down to the key points. 

Take it from me, Contentful is the whole package, and there's so much more for creators, marketers, and developers to discover. If you’re not already a Contentful superfan, then now’s the time to join us. 

Browse some other entries on this blog, reach out to our sales team for a demonstration, or sign up for a free account on the app and kick the tires with a small proof of concept project. Thank you for your time and attention.

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