First project

Contentful

In 2018 we used Contentful for a web based rental platform. The project ran with Next.js in a Docker container on Kubernetes.

Perfect team

Not much later, when GatsbyJs adopted Relay's graphql tag we switched from Next.js to GatsbyJs. At the time, Netlify gained popularity because of popular git based workflows and static site generators like GatbsyJs.

We learned that Contentful, GatsbyJs and Netlify made a perfect team.

Four years later

Anno 2022 the perfect team is still here. Each service improved, but overall the services remain the same.

Modeling content

Having used Contentful for four year we learned how to use the service efficiently. We learned how to model content.

Number of models

Working on that first project in 2018 we found that the maximum number of models that could be defined in Contentful was too limited. We based our models on a combination of objects and their visual representation.

For example, we defined three models for displaying car objects: car, car-listing and car-section.

This made sense from the visual representation. The full overview of a car, a list of cars and the 'call to action' for a specific car. For the full site we needed 21 models.

Less models

For this site 6 models are used. That is because this is a simpler site, because we define our models more efficiently and also because of the Contentful Rich Text Editor that was introduced in 2018.

Next

Part of the efficient model definition is adding a 'variant' field to a data model. The post below is about how this reduces the number of models.