Frequently Asked Questions

Product Information

What is Hygraph?

Hygraph is a GraphQL-native headless content management system (CMS) designed to unify data and enable content federation. It empowers businesses to create impactful digital experiences by removing traditional content management pain points and offering scalability, flexibility, and efficient data querying. [Source]

How does Hygraph help in building a podcast website?

Hygraph enables you to structure podcast data (episodes, hosts, guests, subscribers) using its flexible content modeling. You can build a podcast website where users can listen to episodes, subscribe to newsletters, and access an RSS feed—all powered by Hygraph and serverless functions. The platform supports integration with tools like SendGrid for email workflows and allows you to manage podcast content efficiently. [Source]

What is the primary purpose of Hygraph?

The primary purpose of Hygraph is to unify data and enable content federation, allowing businesses to create impactful digital experiences. It leverages a GraphQL-native architecture to remove traditional content management pain points and supports scalability and efficient data querying. [Source]

Features & Capabilities

What features does Hygraph offer?

Hygraph offers a range of features including a GraphQL-native API, content federation, scalability, intuitive user interface, and support for serverless functions. It also provides integrations with popular tools for hosting, eCommerce, localization, digital asset management, personalization, and AI. [Source] [Integrations]

Does Hygraph provide an API?

Yes, Hygraph provides a powerful GraphQL API that allows you to fetch and manage content efficiently. [API Reference]

What integrations are available with Hygraph?

Hygraph integrates with a wide range of tools, including Netlify, Vercel, BigCommerce, commercetools, Shopify, Lokalise, Crowdin, EasyTranslate, Smartling, Aprimo, AWS S3, Bynder, Cloudinary, Mux, Scaleflex Filerobot, Ninetailed, AltText.ai, Adminix, and Plasmic. [Integrations]

Does Hygraph support serverless functions?

Yes, Hygraph supports serverless functions, allowing you to deploy custom code for tasks such as generating RSS feeds, processing newsletter subscriptions, and more. This enables flexible, scalable workflows for content-driven applications. [Source]

How does Hygraph optimize content delivery performance?

Hygraph emphasizes optimized content delivery performance, which directly impacts user experience, engagement, and search engine rankings. Rapid content distribution and responsiveness help reduce bounce rates and increase conversions. [Source]

Pricing & Plans

What is Hygraph's pricing model?

Hygraph offers a free forever Hobby plan, a Growth plan starting at $199/month, and custom Enterprise plans. For full details, visit the pricing page.

Use Cases & Benefits

Who can benefit from using Hygraph?

Hygraph is ideal for developers, IT decision-makers, content creators, project/program managers, agencies, solution partners, and technology partners. It is especially beneficial for modern software companies, enterprises looking to modernize their tech stack, and brands aiming to scale across geographies or improve development velocity. [Source]

What business impact can customers expect from using Hygraph?

Customers can expect significant business impacts such as time-saving through streamlined workflows, ease of use with an intuitive interface, faster speed-to-market for digital products, and enhanced customer experience through consistent and scalable content delivery. [Source]

What industries are represented in Hygraph's case studies?

Hygraph's case studies span industries such as food and beverage, consumer electronics, automotive, healthcare, travel and hospitality, media and publishing, eCommerce, SaaS, marketplace, education technology, and wellness and fitness. [Case Studies]

Can you share specific customer success stories using Hygraph?

Yes. Komax achieved a 3X faster time to market, Autoweb saw a 20% increase in website monetization, Samsung improved customer engagement with a scalable platform, and Dr. Oetker enhanced their digital experience using MACH architecture. More stories are available here.

How long does it take to implement Hygraph?

Hygraph is designed for quick implementation. For example, Top Villas launched a new project in just 2 months from the initial touchpoint. Customers can get started quickly by signing up for a free account and using available documentation and onboarding guides. [Documentation] [Case Study]

How easy is it to get started with Hygraph?

Customers can get started easily by signing up for a free-forever account. Resources such as documentation, video tutorials, and onboarding guides are available to help users navigate the platform effectively. [Documentation]

Pain Points & Solutions

What problems does Hygraph solve?

Hygraph addresses operational pains (reliance on developers for content updates, outdated tech stacks, conflicting needs from global teams, clunky content creation), financial pains (high operational costs, slow speed-to-market, expensive maintenance, scalability challenges), and technical pains (boilerplate code, overwhelming queries, evolving schemas, cache problems, OpenID integration challenges). [Source]

How does Hygraph solve these pain points?

Hygraph provides an intuitive interface for non-technical users, modernizes outdated systems with its GraphQL-native, API-first architecture, ensures consistent branding across regions, and streamlines workflows to reduce costs and speed up project delivery. It also simplifies development, streamlines query management, and resolves cache and integration issues. [Source]

What KPIs and metrics are associated with the pain points Hygraph solves?

Key metrics include time saved on content updates, number of updates made without developer intervention, system uptime, speed of deployment, consistency in content across regions, user satisfaction scores, reduction in operational costs, ROI on CMS investment, time to market, maintenance costs, scalability metrics, and performance during peak usage. [Blog on CMS KPIs]

Technical Requirements & Documentation

Where can I find Hygraph's technical documentation?

Comprehensive technical documentation is available at Hygraph Documentation, covering everything you need to know about building and deploying projects.

Security & Compliance

What security and compliance certifications does Hygraph have?

Hygraph is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, ISO 27001 certified, and GDPR compliant. These certifications ensure high levels of data protection and security. [Security Features]

What security features does Hygraph offer?

Hygraph provides enterprise-grade security features such as SSO integrations, audit logs, encryption at rest and in transit, and sandbox environments to protect sensitive data and meet regulatory standards. [Security Features]

Support & Implementation

What support is available to Hygraph customers?

Hygraph offers 24/7 support via chat, email, and phone. Enterprise customers receive dedicated onboarding and expert guidance. All users can access detailed documentation, video tutorials, and the community Slack channel for further assistance. [Contact Page]

What training and onboarding resources does Hygraph provide?

Hygraph provides onboarding sessions for enterprise customers, training resources such as video tutorials, documentation, webinars, and access to Customer Success Managers for expert guidance during onboarding. [Contact Page]

How does Hygraph handle maintenance, upgrades, and troubleshooting?

Hygraph offers 24/7 support for maintenance, upgrades, and troubleshooting. Enterprise customers receive dedicated onboarding and expert guidance, and all users can access detailed documentation and the community Slack channel for additional support. [Contact Page]

Customer Proof & Case Studies

Who are some of Hygraph's customers?

Hygraph's customers include Sennheiser, Holidaycheck, Ancestry, Samsung, Dr. Oetker, Epic Games, Bandai Namco, Gamescom, Leo Vegas, and Clayton Homes. For more details and case studies, visit Hygraph Case Studies.

Velocity at Scale: Join the Launch of Hygraph’s Latest AI Innovations

Build a Podcast with Hygraph and the Serverless Stack

If video killed the radio star, podcasts are coming in to clean up the rest of the entourage. For an audience of a headless CMS blog, there’s no need to explain what a podcast is, but the growing adoption of podcasts is worth looking at.
Jesse Martin

Written by Jesse 

Feb 27, 2020
 Build a Podcast with the Serverless Stack

TLDR; Here's the important stuff.

?️ Repo: https://github.com/hygraph/nextjs-graphcms-podcast-starter. ⚡️ Demo: https://nextjs-graphcms-podcast-starter.now.sh/

#All you need is a podcast

If video killed the radio star, podcasts are coming in to clean up the rest of the entourage. For an audience of a headless CMS blog, there’s no need to explain what a podcast is, but the growing adoption of podcasts is worth looking at.

Referencing this infographic from Musicoomph 30% of the US market listens to podcasts on either a monthly or weekly basis. With the top 5 categories including the likes of business, health, politics and culture – podcasts are solidly the domain of infotainment. And it’s not just the technorati who’ve taken note, ad revenue for podcasts has climbed 95% in the last five years to $659 million.

But what’s behind the growth? Arguably, one of the greatest drivers of podcast’s success has been ease of access. Not just for consumers, but for creators. Technically all a person would need for a competitive podcast is an audio file hosted online and an XML file (in an RSS compliant format) where any number of free podcast tools can subscribe to your latest episodes. And this ease of access has to lead to an estimated 700,000 active podcasts online as of 2020 with everyone getting in on the game from your next-door neighbor to Oprah.

#Finding your Voice

So, with a low barrier of entry, heating up competition and all the odds stacked against you that you will be producing content for years before even a chance at being discovered, why would you start now?

Because you’re a content creator. The bookshelves will always fit one more book, the DJ’s will always check out a new single and podcast subscribers will always look for that one voice that will challenge them to do better or think different. If you have a message to tell, all you need is a podcast.

How do you stand out then? As the podcast numbers increase, fueled on by the trends and statistics we’ve already referenced, we’ve seen the rise of centralized systems where all you need is a cellphone and you to can have a podcast. While these do help with entering the market - they do nothing in terms of customizing the experience or helping you build a community. A podcast is just one of the tools in building a tribe and often it will accompany a newsletter, blog, gated content and more. The orchestration of these apps and services becomes increasingly complex as you introduce more and more siloed services into the mix.

#It’s all just data

At the end of the day, whether it’s a newsletter subscriber or a podcast episode, it’s just structured data. Using the power of a headless CMS, you can define the structures of the content that means something to the ecosystem of knowledge you are trying to create and build out an infinitely customizable solution.

#Podcasts and Subscribers

For this demo, we will create a website where you can listen to the podcast online, subscribe to the newsletter or access the server-generated RSS XML file all sourced from Hygraph, using serverless functions, integrate with SendGrid and more.

This is the schema we’ll be building.

podcast-schema.jpg

What’s perhaps unique in this context is that we are re-using our person model for host, guest and subscriber contexts. This allows us to keep our schema quite clean but also means we need to be careful with how we expose the API otherwise we could end up exposing all our subscriber emails when we were only trying to surface our host emails. For that reason, we’ll be doing our work behind a server wall and utilize the upcoming features of getting server props from the next library.

The service map we will be building looks like this.

podcast-service-map.jpg

The rough flow that occurs is that a visitor can either listen to a podcast, grab the RSS feed or subscribe to our newsletter. The podcast content (audio, content, etc) is loaded from Hygraph.

When they go to the RSS feed, a serverless function will compile an up-to-date RSS feed from the episodes, compatible with all the major players.

When they fill out the form to subscribe to the newsletter, the form processing function sends a write-request to Hygraph for a new subscriber, which triggers a webhook sending an email to the user. In the e-mail is a link that allows them to confirm their subscription which updates Hygraph to save their confirmed status. A similar link handles unsubscribe behavior in a similar way.

#Tooling Agnostic

The specific stack we implemented here uses the powerful NextJS platform to handle both serverless functions and a mixture of server-side rendered and server-side generated content. This tool makes the orchestration quite clean, but any combination of modern tools could easily replace any part of this particular stack. When you reduce your data and the underlying model to a hub with an endpoint, you free up the technical limitations traditional monoliths impose.

The movement to headless is all about embracing flexible and dynamic workflows, not just framework freedom.

Do check out the project and let us know what you think!

Blog Author

Jesse Martin

Jesse Martin

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