Introduction to Contentful

Welcome to Contentful! No matter your role or what content you’re interested in managing—from an editor working on a marketing blog to a contributor working on a web app—Contentful has many powerful features to offer you. Contentful is a headless content management system (CMS). You upload your content (be it text, images, or video) to Contentful, and from there can organize and edit it as you desire. What sets Contentful apart from other CMSes is that it’s not page-based. In other CMSes, you adapt your content to the software. With Contentful, it’s the other way around. This concept is called content modeling.

The approach requires practice to get used to, but you’ll find that the flexibility and level of customization offered will help your team work independently and quickly.

Work quickly and independently

After some setup, Contentful will enable your team to work independently and quickly, without needing access to development resources, according to your own workflows and needs. No more filing tickets for other teams and hoping they’ll eventually get back to you from the backlog. You can simply log in, add or edit content, and then hit publish—and your changes will be available immediately. 

Manage all your content in one place

You can manage all your content with Contentful, no matter the format or channel. The key is to think of your content in terms of distribution and reuse, not in terms of format. 

Some examples of projects and content you can build and store with Contentful include:

• Corporate websites

• Support portals and knowledge bases

• Design systems and translation workflows

• Museum guides

• Alexa skills

• Mobile apps

Essentially, if you can model your content, you can edit and store it in Contentful.

Write once, reuse everywhere

The key feature of Contentful for content creators is its use of structured content. This means you can reuse content anywhere. For example, blog posts often have a short bio for their authors. These bios are reused over and over for each article the author posts. In Contentful, you can set this bio as a content type, and then link to it each time you create a new post for that particular author. Whenever you edit the bio content type in the future, your changes will be applied to every place the bio is used—no matter how long ago the post was published. This way, you write the bio itself once, but can both maintain it and reuse it over and over again, saving you time and effort.

Training courses

To learn about how Contentful is different from legacy CMSes and about the benefits of using structured content as a content author, refer to our Learning Center course Intro to Contentful for Content Authors.

Ready to get started? See the Contentful web app overview to get familiar with the interface.