Basic Concepts

1. Contentful
2. Basic Concepts

About Contentful

Contentful is an API-first Content Management System. This means that there's strong separation between our content (that is, the text and information that we want people to read) and its presentation (that is, how that information looks on a particular website). This gives us a lot of flexibility, and means that if we need to change the way the website looks, we aren't locked in.

Content Model

The other advantage of Contentful is its flexible content model. That means that we can think beyond the traditional website structure of 'pages' and 'posts', and instead think about the specific needs of a particular kind of content. So for example, we can have 'events', 'talks' and 'speakers' for EA Global, and each of those will have fields that are useful in context (so, an 'event' might have a Start Date field, or a speaker might have a 'biography' field).

The flexibility of the content model means that you can link different kinds of content together (e.g. a 'talk' can have several 'speakers' and be linked to a particular 'event')

Contentful has two main sections, content and media. You can view a list of either by choosing the tab in the main navigation:

Content is textual content and metadata (e.g. a web page). Media is any type of static file, including images, PDF documents. Typically, you'll be creating some content (e.g. a page), then you'll want to add some media (e.g. an image) to use within that piece of content (like a header image or a graph etc).

More info

• Contentful: Tips for using the Markdown editor (note that using HTML is not supported on CEA sites by default)