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Contentful – a new API-driven CMS for publishing workflows
As I’ve been expecting for the last couple of years, a new breed of CMS is starting to show up on the market; revolving around publishing workflows, with APIs as the center of customization. Here’s a descriptive webinar presentation for Contentful, one of the first such systems I’m aware of.
It calls out the breed of CMS that Textpattern falls into (picking on WordPress, since WP is the reigning King of the old CMS league):
The first CMSes, most of which were developed in the early two-thousands, enabled people to create their own pages without coding them from scratch, which was great, because they came with this predefined content model, and you just had to insert your content and change the design. … [Jump forward a decade and there’s still] this proclivity toward a blog post kind of content, and your expected to insert your title and all your content into a blog/body field … [ultimately] it doesn’t solve the mobile problem [without a lot of development that can cost thousands to millions depending on size of project].
Then it goes into talking about Contentful itself. When you’re interacting with the user admin UI, your interacting with the content API.
On the surface, the extension of custom fields in Txp would seem to offer a similar function as far as a content manager would be concerned. For example, Contentful shows two different views in the demo: a Content Modelling view (7’53” into video), which is different from Txp and appears to provide some powerful typing buttons too. — basically this is your editable content anatomy. Then there’s the Content Management view (8’07” into video) which more resembles what Txp might look like after custom fields in 4.6 are implemented.
While Txp does’t have the two different views for structuring content, I’m imagining that custom fields nevertheless provide for similar kinds of custom content structuration, even if there’s not a full API. Mileage might vary.
My guess is Contentful is just the first of at least a few more such API-driven CMSes to enter the market in the next year. It will be very interesting to see how the ol’ “paleolithic” projects respond.
Last edited by Destry (2014-05-30 18:58:45)
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