What's New - Extensibility

Preview content before publishing an entry. We have released an instant preview extension that takes advantage of the Gatsby preview feature to rebuild pages in real-time. This makes it easy for editorial teams working with Gatsby-powered websites to preview their content in context, without triggering a new build process. The extension lives in a sidebar and enables authors to choose between automatic and manual rebuilds. Please note that this extension requires a premium version of the Gatsby framework that can be purchased here. You can install the extension in your space from the marketplace page.

The custom sidebar gives customers full control over prime real estate inside the Contentful web app. It is now possible to remove core widgets and add custom extensions and sidebar elements in an arbitrary order. Sidebar extensions are not bound to specific fields, making them an ideal candidate for integrations providing contextual data, workflow tools and advanced content transformations.

AWS services are some of the most popular destinations for the outgoing webhooks created by our customers. In order to simplify the workflows involving these services, we have added support for AWS's Signature Version 4 authentication procedure. This enables our customers to build direct connections to AWS services, including those powering the most cutting edge web architectures: S3 for static site hosting, SQS for connecting distributed systems and Lambda for running serverless backends. To help you get started, we've produced a detailed tutorial showing how to leverage Lambda functions for automatically watermarking your media assets.

Contentful has rebuilt its webhooks from the ground up, making it easier than ever to connect your content to 3rd party services and tools. The new webhooks offer powerful filters (including the ability to filter events by environments), support secret headers, and allow developers to transform webhook payloads to match the requirements of the target destination. All this means that you can access a rich ecosystem of complementary services without the overhead of building and maintaining custom API gateways.

In addition to webhooks improvements, we are also releasing a set of pre-built webhook templates that make it possible to connect to popular third-party services like Slack, Algolia, and Netlify — without writing code. For most templates, the configuration process involves providing a valid access token and selecting from a dropdown of pre-configured settings. If you don’t know where to start, our blog offers an concise overview of popular workflows used by current customers.