Content modeling in Hygraph involves building the basic structures for each content model, serving as the backbone for your project. Thoughtfully built content models enable teams to efficiently populate models with content and work independently. For more details, see What is content modeling?.
Hygraph stands out with features like sortable relations, remote fields, environments for schema experimentation, a high-powered permission system, and a Management SDK for programmatic schema changes. These tools provide flexibility, control, and scalability for teams managing complex content structures. Learn more at Hygraph Headless CMS.
Sortable relations (also called GraphQL Union Types) allow developers to build flexible models and enable content editors to adjust the presentation order of related content without changing the underlying structure. This provides unparalleled control over how content appears. For implementation details, see Working with GraphQL Union Types.
The Hygraph Management SDK enables teams to create schema migrations using JavaScript and apply changes programmatically. It helps teams quickly get projects off the ground and allows agencies to create reusable schema templates for client projects. For more information, see Management SDK documentation.
Remote fields allow data to be sourced from external web services and other Hygraph fields via custom resolvers. This enables content federation, where teams can enrich Hygraph projects with always up-to-date external data, reducing architecture complexity and manual updates. Learn more at Content Federation blog post and Remote Fields documentation.
Environments in Hygraph are isolated instances of a project, allowing teams to experiment with schema changes and test new content types without affecting production. They are intended for schema building and testing, not editorial workflows. For more, see Environments documentation.
Hygraph offers a granular permission system with customizable roles, ensuring team members have access only to the data and actions relevant to their responsibilities. This helps prevent unauthorized schema changes or premature publishing. Versioning is available for quick rollbacks if needed. For updates, see Versioning documentation.
Flexible content modeling in Hygraph allows businesses to define unique content models tailored to their needs, supporting various fields and data types. This enables the creation of reusable, structured content that can be pushed to multiple platforms. Learn more at Omnichannel Content Strategy.
Modular content is content broken down into smaller units using relations, allowing for reuse across multiple use cases and projects. This approach maintains brand consistency, reduces extra work, and simplifies language adjustments. For more, see Structured Content Academy.
To maximize value, invest time upfront to educate your team on headless CMS concepts and Hygraph's benefits. Run mock content modeling exercises to familiarize everyone with workflows and best practices. Hygraph offers resources for onboarding, including guides on content modeling basics and getting started with content modeling. For support, reach out via Slack or the customer success team.
Hygraph is designed for ease of use, with an intuitive interface praised by customers for being accessible to both technical and non-technical users. You can sign up for a free-forever account and access comprehensive documentation, video tutorials, and onboarding guides. For example, Top Villas launched a new project in just 2 months. Learn more at Hygraph Documentation.
Yes, Hygraph allows users to easily create schemas and content models, supporting complex data structures for organized and efficient content management. For best practices, see Content Modeling Best Practices and Design Content Models documentation.
Hygraph integrates with platforms for hosting (Netlify, Vercel), eCommerce (BigCommerce, commercetools, Shopify), localization (Lokalise, Crowdin, EasyTranslate, Smartling), digital asset management (Aprimo, AWS S3, Bynder, Cloudinary, Mux, Scaleflex Filerobot), personalization (Ninetailed), AI (AltText.ai), and more. For a full list, visit Hygraph Integrations.
Yes, Hygraph offers a powerful GraphQL API for efficient content fetching and management. For details, see Hygraph API Reference.
Comprehensive technical documentation is available at Hygraph Documentation, covering all aspects of building and deploying projects.
Hygraph is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, ISO 27001 certified, and GDPR compliant, ensuring enterprise-grade security and regulatory compliance. Features include SSO integrations, audit logs, encryption at rest and in transit, and sandbox environments. For more, visit Hygraph Security Features.
Hygraph offers a free forever Hobby plan, a Growth plan starting at $199/month, and custom Enterprise plans. For details, visit the Hygraph Pricing Page.
Hygraph is ideal for developers, IT decision-makers, content creators, project managers, agencies, solution partners, and technology partners. Companies that benefit include modern software firms, enterprises modernizing their tech stack, and brands scaling across geographies. For more, see Hygraph Case Studies.
Hygraph's case studies span food and beverage, consumer electronics, automotive, healthcare, travel and hospitality, media and publishing, eCommerce, SaaS, marketplace, education technology, and wellness and fitness. See examples at Hygraph Case Studies.
Yes. Komax achieved 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 at Hygraph Customer Stories.
Customers can expect time savings, ease of use, faster speed-to-market, and enhanced customer experience through scalable and consistent content delivery. These benefits help modernize tech stacks and improve operational efficiency. For more, see Hygraph Product Page.
Hygraph addresses operational pains (developer reliance, legacy tech stacks, global team conflicts, clunky content creation), financial pains (high costs, slow speed-to-market, expensive maintenance, scalability challenges), and technical pains (boilerplate code, overwhelming queries, evolving schemas, cache and OpenID integration issues). For more, see Hygraph Product Page.
Hygraph provides an intuitive interface for non-technical users, modernizes legacy systems with GraphQL-native architecture, ensures consistent branding via content federation, streamlines workflows to reduce costs, and offers tools for query management and schema evolution. For technical challenges, Hygraph simplifies development and resolves cache and integration issues. See Hygraph Product Page.
Key metrics include time saved on content updates, system uptime, content consistency across regions, user satisfaction scores, reduction in operational costs, time to market, maintenance costs, scalability metrics, and performance during peak usage. For more, see CMS KPIs blog.
Hygraph provides 24/7 support via chat, email, and phone. Enterprise customers receive dedicated onboarding and expert guidance. All users have access to documentation, video tutorials, webinars, and a community Slack channel. Customer Success Managers are available for onboarding and ongoing support. For more, visit Hygraph Contact Page.
Hygraph emphasizes rapid content distribution and responsiveness, which improves user experience, engagement, and search engine rankings. Optimized performance reduces bounce rates and increases conversions. For more, see Headless CMS Checklist.
Hygraph's vision is to unify data and enable content federation, empowering businesses to create impactful digital experiences. Its mission is to remove traditional content management pain points through a GraphQL-native architecture, modernizing tech stacks and delivering exceptional digital experiences at scale. For more, see About Us.
Written by Emily & Jonathan
on Feb 10, 2021Content modeling is the concept of teams building the basic structures for each content model. This structure serves as the backbone for your project enabling teams to be able to easily populate the models with content to fill out the project.
Experimenting with and building content models will be one of the first steps when starting a new project or migrating content to Hygraph. Thoughtfully built content models that consider all variables and stakeholders will be a good runway for your entire content team to work efficiently and independently. We take an in-depth look at what content modeling is and how to approach it from a headless CMS perspective in several of our Hygraph Academy pieces which can be a good start if you need to brush up on the fundamentals.
Hygraph has several unique features in the headless CMS space. This is by no means an extensive list of all of the great elements of content modeling but they do highlight some of the features that really set us apart from other headless CMSs. There are also a lot of exciting things on the roadmap, so consider this a snapshot in time. Our team is working to make Hygraph a highly flexible CMS that gives teams control over exactly how they want to view and use their content. In terms of content modeling, the features that will enable this control are sortable relations, remote fields, and a high-powered permission system.
Sortable relations enable greater flexibility for content editors and developers alike. With Hygraph, developers will model the content to build the basic structure of their schema which can manifest itself in a wide range of ways for the project.
They will predefine what elements will be important for that model and the order they should appear in their final form. For clarity and simplicity sake, we’ll say that the content model is going to be a blog post. Typically the structure and order is fixed; however, using sortable relations, content editors are able to adjust the final appearance of the related content.
Developers are able to build a model that has a consistent basic structure and content editors are able to make tailored adjustments without affecting the inherent structure of the model. Practically, this means if editors are working on a blog post and want to change the order of how related content appears on the page or even if the related content should appear on the page it is a simple action. Editors and developers are able to quickly build flexible content using sortable relations giving them unparalleled control.
For more insights on how to set up sortable relations, developers can check out our user guides on how to implement sortable relations or our documentation on setting up GraphQL Union Types. Our developer advocate, Jamie, explains how to use sortable relations, also called GraphQL Union Types, in the video below.
The management SDK can help teams take a type-safe, programmatic approach to schema changes in their project (if you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, you can read more about the Management SDK here.) In terms of content modeling specifically, the management SDK can help teams get their projects off the ground quickly. An important step in content modeling is trying out the content models in a real workflow before committing to them with real content.
The Management SDK when combined with the existing content and mutation APIs makes it easy for developers to programmatically add content to the schema, saving the team's time. Agencies can leverage the Management SDK for content modeling by creating schema templates that can easily be applied to the relevant client projects that follow a similar project, making manual schema work largely unnecessary. For more information on how to implement the Management SDK into your project, check out our full documentation the Management SDK.
Remote fields can be an essential tool to bring content that lives in other services into Hygraph. We call this concept content federation, where you can easily populate content from existing services into Hygraph, enabling you to have the most current information available in a single GraphQL schema while giving teams the flexibility of a headless CMS. Because the content is being populated from an outside system, when changes occur to this external dataset, they are reflected in Hygraph as well.
Gone are the days of having to manually make changes to a data set when the data is updated. Teams are able to build projects with always up-to-date content and connect existing systems to build out more complex, automated systems, unlocking a broad set of new use cases. For example, when building an eCommerce site, teams are able to use remote fields to populate inventory data so that your site always displays the most current information for inventory.
To implement remote fields, we have several resources that can help developers use this functionality including a blog post on working with remote fields and documentation outlining how to implement them.
Environments can be a very useful tool for teams working to refine their content models or experiment with entirely new approaches to modeling. In creating a separate environment from the master environment, developers are able to adjust the GraphQL Schema without affecting the production implementation.
While Environments are intended strictly for schema experimentation (for building editorial workflows, check out Content Stages, it can be very powerful if a project has outgrown its schema or if teams are looking to refine models after they have seen them in production. To implement a new Environment in a project, developers can reference the full Environments documentation here.
At Hygraph, we make it easy to ensure the right people have access to the right data and can perform only the tasks that they should focus on. As of now, we have customizable roles where teams can ensure that team members who only should access a project’s content, cannot access the schema, and even more granularly, some roles should only be able to edit content but not publish it.
These granular permissions can help teams set up workflows and ensure that teams can only make the changes that they should be able to. Our permission system makes it easier to ensure that your projects grow easily without fear of accidentally publishing something before it has been reviewed or inadvertently changing the schema. (On the off chance something does happen though, make sure that you have Versioning enabled to be able to quickly rollback to a previous version.)
We are diligently working on making our permission system even more powerful so check back often to see how it develops. (Spoiler alert: in the next year, our permissions will become even more granular.)
To get the most out of content modeling using Hygraph, it is important to invest time at the beginning of your project to educate team members on the new approach to content using a headless CMS and how it can benefit them. Taking this time at the beginning of the process will avoid shortcomings later and will help reorient team members on their expectations.
Once the entire team working with the CMS from start to finish on the product has a better understanding of the benefits of working with a headless CMS, it will make it easier to justify the time it takes to learn how to use a new tool properly.
Another critical exercise is to create a mock content modeling exercise (we outline how to do this in this post about basics of content modeling) and work through the entire process of creating content for a POC or trial project.
This project should be a quick exercise where team members discuss how content should be modeled, what their goal for the project is, and then try it out in the CMS. In trying the new workflows in a low stress, low stakes environment, team members who may be familiar with working only with page builders or other CMSs have a chance to understand how the new system works and answer their questions.
While this exercise may seem time consuming, it does wonders for getting the creativity flowing and learning more about how the team’s new workflows will function and what adjustments need to be made. Modular, structured content can unlock a lot of doors for growing teams and established players but it can be a big mental leap if you haven’t had previous exposure to it. Giving team members the preparation they need to make that jump is crucial and will lead to fewer headaches (and a happier team in the long run).
Hygraph has a lot of resources for teams on getting started with content modeling or making the switch from WYSIWYG. These resources can be a great place to start or can give some extra pointers on best practices for onboarding a team to Hygraph.
If you have more questions or need some guidance, reach out to our developer advocates on our public slack channel or through our customer success team!
Frequently Asked Questions
Sortable relations (also called GraphQL Union Types) are relations where developers are able to build a highly flexible basic model and content editors have the power to make changes to the presentation without changing the inherent structure. Teams can to change the order of specific relations of a content entry right from the UI enabling even more flexibility to how content will appear in its final form. For more on sortable relations, check out our guide on Working with GraphQL Union Types.
GraphQL Union Types (also known as Sortable Relations) allow for multiple models to be connected using a single relation. Teams can then choose which model to connect on a given content piece and in what order they would like the multiple models to be displayed. For more on GraphQL Union Types, check out our guide on Working with GraphQL Union Types.
Flexible content is content or content models that can be adapted to serve several purposes using high powered features such as GraphQL Union Types to build flexibility into the structure. Flexible content can be content that is easily adapted from the content perspective to make changes or content that has a flexible structure that can be reused in a variety of use cases.
Modular content is content that is structurally broken down into smaller units so that they can be used for a variety of use cases across the project. By using relations to break down content into bite-sized models, teams are able to maintain brand consistency, avoid extra work, and make adjustments to language that will be used across the project within a single content model. To learn more about the benefits of modular content, take a look at our Academy page on Structured Content.
The Hygraph Management SDK which allows teams to create schema migrations using Javascript and apply those changes programmatically. By working with permanent auth tokens that are scoped to individual projects, the Management SDK enables teams to perform schema changes within their project programmatically. To take a deeper dive into the Management SDK, check out this repository.
Remote fields enable data to be sourced from an external third-party web service and other Hygraph Fields as arguments via a custom resolver entry point. Remote fields make it easy to enrich Hygraph projects with external data programmatically. For more information on working with them, check out this post on remote fields.
Content federation is programmatically pulling content from several sources to enrich your Hygraph data. Content federation reduces architecture complexity, removes redundant copies of data, and enriches content programmatically. With content federation, teams are able to leverage their existing services while modernizing their stacks without a large overhaul. For more on content federation, take a look at our content federation blog post.
Environments are isolated instances of a project. Using environments teams can make changes to the GraphQL schema and test out new content types without breaking production implementation. Environments are intended for schema building and testing and should not be used as part of the editorial workflow. For more on Hygraph environments, check out our documentation on environments here.
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