By Davide Borsatto, on Feb 13, 2017

Don't stop me now: improvements we shipped in November, December, and January

Christmas has come and passed, but this doesn't mean we took too much time off from working on the features that make Contentful special. Here's a selection of improvements that we relased during November, December, and January.

Searching on references

This is a simple yet powerful one. Imagine you wanted to recreate IMDB using Contentful, you would define a Movie and an Actor content type, with each movie having multiple actors. Before searching on references the process of filtering movies by an actor was a tedious one, but now you can get all the data in a simple query. Of course, an example is worth a thousand words!

This is the old approach, where you had to first fetch the ID for the Actor you're looking for, and then use it for fetching the movies:

https://cdn.contentful.com/space/space-id/entries
    ?content_type=actors
    &fields.name[all]=Trejo,Danny

https://cdn.contentful.com/space/space-id/entries
    ?content_type=movies
    &fields.actors.sys.id[in]=someID
 

But now, you can do this in one simple query:

https://cdn.contentful.com/spaces/my-space-id/entries/
    ?content_type=movies
    &fields.actors.sys.contentType.sys.id=actors
    &fields.actors.fields.name[all]=Trejo,Danny
 

Find out more about this powerful new feature.

Bulk editing of references

Working with entries that reference others can become troublesome, and after a while you may find yourself needing to open more and more tabs to edit all the referenced entries. No more! Our shiny new bulk editor allows you to quickly edit all entries that are referenced in the current one. Just don't forget to enable it in the Appearance tab in the field configuration.

improvements-novdecjan-bulk-editor

Official SDKs for Python and .NET

It was about time! Contentful has now officially supported SDKs for Python and .NET, built respectively by David Litvak and Robert Linde (make sure to follow them on Twitter). And the .NET SDK even supports our Content Management API! We also blogged about some great insights about async and await in the .NET SDK, which is a great read even if you're a novice on the topic.

SVG previews in our web app

You know SVGs, those images that are actually secretly XML code? Well, until recently our web app saw them as such, with the unfortunate effect of not allowing them to be properly previewed. In the effort of constantly improving the authoring experience, we taught our web app a couple of tricks, and now you'll be able to see SVG images as, well, images.

improvements-novdecjan-svg-preview

UI tweaks

We like to think of these little tweaks as tokens of appreciation, because we care. We're constantly making an effort on improving the interface of our web app, a little something here, a little something there, so editors too can say they love using Contentful. Among our favorite improvements, the search result interface (we think it's much cleaner now), recent published versions in the entry sidebar for quick comparison, and an even better Markdown editor.

The redesigned search result interface

improvements-novdecjan-versions-sidebar

Shortcuts to the recently published versions

We are working hard on making Contentful the best experience for all kinds of users, from hardcore developers to non-technical editors. And we appreciate your feedback! Hit us up on Twitter and tell us what you'd like to see us releasing next, and who knows, we might already be working on it.

Davide Borsatto

Davide is primarily a PHP developer who cares way too much about making code look nice and tidy, believes code linting should be mandatory at all times, and always uses spaces for indentation. Follow him on Twitter and on Github.