Contentful partner Xebia is an international software consulting company focusing on web and mobile design and development. Recently Xebia has been redesigning the website of a major French online bank and they have chosen Contentful for content management of some 600+ static pages of the site. Read the full story below.
Project requirements
As the website contains about 600 static pages, the editorial team needed a CMS where they could create and edit all the content, without having to involve their developers in the process. There is a number of other great benefits in having a CMS-generated static website, such as better performance, scalability and security; this static approach is discussed in detail in this article. Another requirement from the bank was that the site has to be responsive so that the content is presented appropriately across all the range of devices. Additionally, the bank was looking for maximum flexibility in terms of content structure.
"The CMS the bank used before exhibited certain problems. First and foremost, both the contents and styles were stored inside one tool, which was very limiting. They asked us to implement a solution in which it would be simple to create new templates and reuse the same content in different places without having to duplicate it." – Jean-Sébastien Franck, Software Engineer, Xebia
Contentful is a fit
The Xebia team was choosing between Contentful and another API-based CMS, but finally selected Contentful due to a number of reasons. First, it was mandatory to fully separate content from styling (for responsive design and reuse purposes), and Contentful has been designed exactly for such a setup. Second, Contentful allowed to structure data in a highly flexible manner, which was a part of the project requirements. Finally, the existing cloud infrastructure as well as RESTful API and libraries for existing programming languages significantly simplified the development process.
Content reuse meets responsive design
The website has to be compatible with a variety of devices and browsers, ranging from latest iOS and Android smartphones to desktop browsers (IE8 included).
"The separation of content and style played an important role in building the responsive website: we could style the pages differently depending on the device, and still have a single content source." – Thibaud Cavin, Head of Xebia Studio, Xebia
Contribution to the community
Over the course of this project, the team at Xebia has created a tool to synchronise data between Contentful spaces. It can be quite helpful for other Contentful users, so they thought they would share it. You can read the full story in the Xebia guest post How to sync spaces in Contentful, or have a look at the script right now on Github.
That's all for now. Thanks for reading.
