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Traditional content management systems (CMSs) can challenge your digital marketing teams since they often require extensive developer support to tweak templates, author experiences, and content models. As a result, your content authors can feel constrained by rigid, page-centric systems that prioritize displaying content exclusively on websites. Today, your marketing teams require more autonomy, flexibility, and efficiency to create and deliver content in a composable omnichannel way.

In our recent collaboration with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), we saw how Contentful's headless platform addresses these challenges with its robust tools for creating flexible content models, customizing authoring experiences, and crafting digital experiences for unique localizations and channels.

Contentful is a headless platform that’s different from a traditional CMS because it decouples the creation and organization of content from its visual presentation. This approach provides greater flexibility, scalability, and performance, allowing your authors to focus on efficient and reusable content models that can deliver content to any digital channel.

A content model defines elements and their relationships to each other, establishing structure and hierarchy for content and data. This structure becomes your foundation for creating content types and components. Building a good model is essential for success, especially if you use content across several platforms and channels like USHMM.

Contentful offers user-friendly tools for creating content models with minimal developer assistance. Content and media for projects are organized within Spaces on the platform. You build content models within a Space and can easily duplicate and reference content types across Spaces.

Unlike other platforms, Contentful doesn't impose default content types or hierarchical structures, which enables your team to design models from scratch and break free from a page-centric framework. At first, this method might feel overwhelming, until you realize that you can focus on creating flexible structures that serve your website and other digital platforms.

Contentful makes it easier to understand and collaborate on your content model through its interactive visual modeling tool.

A screenshot of a tool depicting a visual flow diagram of a content model for navigation.
Contentful provides a Visual Modeler tool for you to build a content model and easily collaborate on changes visually.

Working with USHMM, we leveraged Contentful's flexibility and tools to plan a content model that powered unique navigation menus, custom components, and reusable content structures that served the Museum's content team and website visitors.

With our model established for USHMM, we began crafting content types, components, and page templates. We utilized Contentful’s Reference Fields to efficiently re-use structured content within components and pages. For example, we designed a single navigation model that was re-purposed across the site in a variety of components. Our headless approach gave each navigation component a distinct visual display while using a single content structure for links and menus.

We applied the same method to develop a custom page template structure that allows content authors to flexibly reference specific page content. This solution enabled USHMM to efficiently publish translated content for unique localizations and multilingual audiences.

Adopting a structured content model, combined with referenced content, streamlined the migration of nearly 2,000 content pages from USHMM’s old CMS to a well-organized set of content, components, and pages in Contentful.

Learn more about how Contentful boosted USHMM’s web performance and flexibility.

Discover how Velir leveraged Contentful to create an efficient, adaptable content authoring experience that helps USHMM’s content teams easily manage multiple sites.

Once we built the content model and created components, we partnered with USHMM to optimize their teams' authoring experience. Contentful presents two main ways to work with content, the Web App and a free add-on tool called Compose.

The Web App serves as the default experience, catering to more technically inclined authors and marketing teams who need editorial tools to run content operations. Additionally, it includes a live preview feature allowing your authors to visualize their content changes in real-time.

Organizing the experience in the Web App for authors can be difficult, given its inability to group fields and sections. A poorly planned content model can make a web of nested references and a lengthy set of fields that may overwhelm some authors in the Web App.

For a more user-friendly and organized interface tailored to less technical authors, we installed Compose. Compose displays a simpler, more organized authoring environment for less technical authors and for managing translated/localized content. While Compose may lack some powerful editorial tools, we found combining its features with the Web App provided USHMM with the right authoring experience for both their editorial teams and less technical authors.

Contentful already has fantastic tools for making flexible content models, delivering content to any channel, and optimizing your content authoring experience, but they’re continuing to innovate and grow their platform.

They recently debuted a brand-new authoring tool called Studio. This product introduces tools for your teams that build upon existing structured content models and design systems so users can craft visually engaging content. We’re currently exploring Studio and are excited about its potential.

Our experience utilizing Contentful to empower USHMM’s content authors has us excited for the future of the platform and its headless approach. If your organization is considering going headless, contact us. We can discuss your options and share more about how Contentful can help your organization deliver better digital experiences.

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