Contentful Announces Authoring Hub for the Enterprise

Contentful, the leading content infrastructure for digital teams, today announced new features designed to enhance and streamline the authoring and editing experience for everyone who manages content at scale. These new features provide enterprises with a set of tools to create a custom authoring hub, which organizations can use as a single control center to create, optimize and deliver content across their entire digital footprint.

According to Forrester Research*, “web content management systems (CMSes) are evolving as channel-centric technologies give way to omnichannel digital efforts, boosting the value of content in all formats delivered to all users. As a result, application development and delivery (AD&D) pros and vendors should not stretch the category of web CMS any further beyond the current generation of solutions. We need a new container to meet tomorrow's challenges: Agile CMS.”

Traditionally, there have been gaps in the offerings of legacy CMS providers and newer cloud-based solutions, meaning an enterprise would be need multiple CMSes, each serving a different purpose. This made the user experience inconsistent, causing a fragmented workflow that was confusing for editors, and difficult for developers. With the new authoring hub, Contentful is one step closer to providing an agile CMS solution which can handle the needs of all digital business teams, initiatives, and channels, with the UI custom-tailored to each.

“Reinforcing our commitment to content infrastructure as the CMS of the future, we’re helping enterprises to build the right technology stack for running content operations at scale,” said Peter Sunna, head of product at Contentful “With these new features, we’re empowering digital teams to build a seamless tool for managing and delivering relevant content without sacrificing any security, localization, compliance, or workflow requirements.”

The authoring hub solves three critical problems – content creators can produce all content in one place; third-party tools and data-backed insights can be embedded directly into the authoring environment; and developers can easily deliver content across all digital channels and customer touchpoints. The new feature set is comprised of:

• Rich Text Editor (RTE) – a modern implementation of the classical concept: author content in an intuitive way, while delivering it in a structured format.
• Customizable Sidebar – helps teams be more productive by exposing the tools and data they need within the authoring environment.
• Extension Framework – provides modern tooling, including a newly open-sourced Contentful design system, for easily building, styling, and deploying in-app widgets and service integrations.
• GraphQL API – a query format that enables developers to turn siloed backends into streamlined, high-performance apps and websites.

The Authoring Hub builds on the Contentful Content Hub, which enterprises use to aggregate all of their content in one place and easily update, audit, or share it on any platform. With a wide partner network, Contentful also achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Digital Customer Experience (DCX) Competency status, which recognizes that Contentful provides proven technology and deep expertise to help Digital Customer Experience customers by providing end-to-end solutions for all phases of the digital customer acquisition and retention life cycle.

To learn more about the Contentful Authoring Hub, please see our blog post: “Authoring Hub: A modern way of running content operations”