Understanding Contentstack

All content of the website will be stored and maintained in a Headless Content Management System (HCMS), in our case in Contentstack.

A HCMS allows to define data structures and relations between datasets without any coding efforts. HCMS provide interfaces for creating, editing and maintaining datasets as well ass assets (files) and managing different permissions of the HCMS. Different to a classical CMS, like e.g. WordPress, a HCMS aims at being flexibly adaptable to many different purposes and even quite complex processes.

With the advantages, a few issues come: HCMS interfaces are not explicitly optimized to a defined specific processes. Sometimes you have to add a few clicks more. Basically, if you once understood the principle, working with a HCMS is comfortable.

With Contentstack comes a complete customizable user interface to allow to maintain content without any coding skills. Nevertheless, it helps to understand the key terms used in Contentstack and what relational data management means.

Relational Data Management

If you want to manage a huge amount of data, like e.g. for a website, and think about the different kinds of data, you will see that recurring patterns can be identified.

Simple example: every single page of a website consists of a header, a navigation, a footer and main content. Most of the elements are similar or identical on most of the pages, just the main content differs from one page to the other. If you define one data pattern to manage all data of all elements in one, you will see that you end up in a huge table which is hardly maintainable and in most of the table fields you will find the same values. To e.g. change a simple phrase in the footer, you have to update a lot of datasets in the table. This is tedious and even risky.

If you organize the data relational, you organize the fields in multiple tables, e.g. one for the navigation, one, for the main content etc. Then you also create an additional element where you just define, which dataset from the navigation table, which from the footer table, which from the main content table etc. should be used for a specific page. You define relations.

This is what you basically do in Contentstack, when you create a new page.

Contentstack HCMS Terms

In Contentstack, you work with such a relational data management.

• A relation between two datasets is called Reference. Depending on the Content Type settings, you can reference datasets from one or multiple specific Content Types.

• A Content Type is like a table in Contentstack, coming with a customized edit form.

• With the edit form of a Content Type, you can create or edit an Entry, which is a dataset.

• An Asset in Contentstack is a file you upload to Contentstack, like images, PDFs etc.

Please find more terms in the Glossary.

Please refer to the Contentstack User Manual for more detailed information about Contentstack.