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Janice Rodrigues

Janice is a Technical Writer at Contentstack. She works in feature and API documentation but loves handling diverse documentation projects. Janice holds a Bachelor's degree in Information Technology. Her interests include baking, reading, and catching up on movies and series!

Posts by Janice Rodrigues

May 20, 2022

Introducing Asset Sidebar Extension and Additional Metadata Support

We are excited to introduce two of our latest features: Asset Sidebar Extension and Additional Metadata Support for entries and assets. Asset Sidebar Extension is a new type of Experience Extension. It lets developers create sidebar widgets to add capabilities or custom functionalities for editors to manage, transform and optimize stack assets. Additional Metadata Support lets developers add metadata to assets and entries (via API) without incrementing their versions. This helps better organize or categorize assets and aids easy search. Let’s look at the details of these two exciting features. Meet the Newest Member of the Experience Extension Family: Asset Sidebar Extension If you have been using Contentstack’s Experience Extensions, you already know the power of extensions and the value they can add to your content management experience. With the all-new Asset Sidebar Extension, you can create custom widgets that dramatically enhance the way your content editors manage assets. You can, for example, create widgets for cropping images, adding filters or converting assets into other formats. You can also add auto image tagging, audio to text, quality enhancer, file compression and finding similar images. The possibilities are endless. You can even choose to integrate with third-party applications to create custom widgets. Here is an example of the Asset Sidebar Extension: With few design limitations in the extension creation process, you can develop robust extensions for your growing business needs. Why Should You Use Asset Sidebar Extension? It can make asset management a lot easier for your content managers. That’s not all, let's look at some of the other valuable benefits you gain with this extension: Optimize your assets within a single application thus increasing productivity Improve front-end delivery and performance with underlying API-driven optimization Tailor your business experience to meet unique requirements using Contentstack as a medium, with the help of custom asset extensions Accelerate utilization of media files in the native Contentstack repository Automate mundane tasks Read our documentation to get started with Asset Sidebar Extensions. Manage Entries And Assets Better with Additional Metadata Support Metadata, as you might already know, is the data that gives more information about other data, but not about the content of the data. When you create a new entry or upload an asset, Contentstack adds some basic metadata by default, such as: created by created at file size last modified content type referenced in But as your content needs grow, you may want to add custom metadata to manage your content effectively. To that end, we have added support for custom metadata for your assets and entries. As of now, this can be done only via API (not through the UI), using the Metadata Content Management API requests. Examples of custom, additional metadata that you can add include: entry type (parent entry or referenced entry) or asset type (image, video, audio clip, or document) owner details for an entry or asset copyrights for an image or document generic SEO tags related articles custom tags or labels Why Add Additional Metadata and What Should You Consider While Adding Metadata? There is a fine line between having enough or too much metadata. Entries and assets become versatile and much easier to access and manage with additional metadata support. The absence of metadata defeats the purpose of the digital asset management system and makes it challenging to find content. However, if you give away way too much meta information about your digital content, it may allow harmful access to external users and lead to copyright infringements. So, add enough metadata to fulfill your business requirements, but make sure it isn't too extensive. Read more about Additional Metadata Support for entries and assets in our documentation. Note: These plan-based features are only available in the new Contentstack interface.

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Jan 10, 2022

Introducing JSON Rich Text Editor Plugins for Dynamic Content Experiences

Contentstack constantly strives to improve its user experience so you can manage your content easily and seamlessly. With that goal in mind, we recently introduced the JSON Rich Text Editor that enables structured, rich text content ready to be consumed by any frontend framework. To further enhance the business user experience, Contentstack now introduces JSON RTE Plugins that let you extend the functionality of the JSON Rich Text Editor to serve your unique business needs while providing a native Contentstack look and feel. JSON RTE Plugins – What are they? JSON Rich Text Editor Plugins let you customize, improve and extend the functionality of your JSON RTE. You can add prebuilt plugins available in Contentstack or create custom plugins of your own to integrate with third-party applications. Traditionally, you would need a custom field to set up the logic to interact with rich text content. With these plugins, you can directly deploy logic inside the JSON RTEs, allowing content managers to get more from their content. What Prebuilt Plugins Does Contentstack Provide? Contentstack provides these prebuilt plugins to enhance your rich text editing experience: Highlight - Allows you to highlight parts of your content, such as a line of text or a paragraph. InfoPanel - Allows you to place important content inside a colored panel to make it stand out. Word Count - Allows you to track the word count for your JSON Rich Text Editor content. After adding the plugins you need, provide the necessary configuration details. Besides the prebuilt plugins, you can also create customized JSON RTE plugins of your own, host them externally and provide the URL when configuring your plugin in Contentstack. What Are the Use Cases of JSON RTE Plugins? You can leverage JSON RTE Plugins for a variety of use cases: For market segregation: Make content sections visible only to targeted regions and markets. For content testing: Test specific paragraphs, sentences or words within the rich text editor to optimize without content duplication using an A/B or MVT testing tool such as Optimizely. For personalized experiences: Integrate with third-party personalization engines to adjust the tone of voice or inline content representation depending on the consumer persona. For associated content creation: Leverage your content and assets in third-party repositories, such as Digital Asset Management, in line with the rich text editor. For design-centric formatting rules: Include styling and layout rules in a format-neutral way. For content variables: Create variables representing product or brand names and reuse them across different sections of the rich text content, thus avoiding content duplication. How to Get Started with JSON RTE Plugins Once you have added a prebuilt plugin or created one of your own in your stack, you can use it for any JSON Rich Text Editor field in your content type. For example, follow these steps to use the Highlight plugin in a content type: Go to your stack, type “C” to open the Content Types list page and select the content type you want to edit. In the “Content Type Builder” page, click on an existing JSON RTE field or add a JSON Rich Text Editor field in your content type by clicking on the “Insert a field” (+) sign. Under Select Plugin(s), select the Highlight plugin from the pop-up window that appears. Once done, click on either Save or Save and Close to save your changes. To use the Highlight plugin, create an entry for this content type, and you will see this plugin within the JSON Rich Text Editor on your entry page as shown below: Do More with JSON RTE Plugins JSON RTE Plugins is a plan-based feature that is only available in the new Contentstack interface. With such customized plugins, the possibilities to extend the capabilities of your rich text editor are limitless. Read our documentation on JSON Rich Text Editor Plugins to get started with this feature.

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