Frequently Asked Questions

Distributed Content Management & Content Federation

What is distributed content management?

Distributed content management is a pattern where content is managed across multiple specialized systems, each optimized for a specific data type (e.g., marketing copy in a headless CMS, product information in a PIM, inventory in a WMS, customer data in a CRM). Editors work in the systems best suited to their expertise, and data is unified through a federation pattern. Hygraph supports this approach with its Content Federation capabilities. [Source]

Why is content velocity important in distributed content management?

Content velocity—the ability to produce and publish content rapidly—is crucial for engaging audiences, driving long-tail leads, and supporting brand growth. Distributed content management enables teams to work in their preferred tools, increasing content velocity and allowing for more experimentation and faster iteration. [Source]

How does Hygraph support content federation and distributed content management?

Hygraph enables content federation by allowing multiple data sources (such as PIM, WMS, CMS, and CRM) to be unified into a single API using its Remote Sources functionality. This approach lets editors and developers work in their preferred systems while maintaining standardized data and APIs for efficient site and application development. [Source]

What is the role of content standardization in a distributed CMS approach?

Content standardization ensures that, even when teams use different systems, data structures and APIs remain consistent. This is critical for developer velocity and for building performant, bug-free applications. Hygraph helps enforce these standards through its federation capabilities, allowing for seamless integration and standardized data across platforms. [Source]

How can distributed content management reduce training time and costs?

Allowing editors and writers to use familiar tools reduces the need for extensive training and support. By involving teams in crafting their editing experience and tool selection, organizations can decrease onboarding time and support costs, freeing up resources for content strategy and distribution. [Source]

Can you provide a real-world example of distributed content management in action?

Dr. Oetker, a global food and beverage wholesaler, uses multiple systems for localized websites, product information, and customer data. Product data lives in their PIM, customer data in Force.com, and editorial content in Hygraph. All systems are unified via Next.js for 40 localized websites, ensuring each team works in their area of expertise while maintaining data standards. [Case Study]

How does a distributed CMS approach benefit eCommerce experiences?

A distributed CMS approach allows eCommerce businesses to integrate multiple data sources—such as product information from a PIM, inventory from a WMS, and marketing content from a CMS—into a unified API. This enables flexible, scalable, and efficient content management and delivery across channels. Hygraph's Remote Sources feature facilitates this integration. [Source]

Features & Capabilities

What are the key features of Hygraph?

Hygraph offers a GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, scalability, and a user-friendly interface. It supports integrations with popular platforms (e.g., Netlify, Vercel, Shopify, BigCommerce), provides a powerful GraphQL API, and includes enterprise-grade security features. [Features]

What integrations does Hygraph support?

Hygraph supports integrations with hosting and deployment platforms (Netlify, Vercel), eCommerce solutions (BigCommerce, commercetools, Shopify), localization tools (Lokalise, Crowdin, EasyTranslate, Smartling), digital asset management (Aprimo, AWS S3, Bynder, Cloudinary, Mux, Scaleflex Filerobot), personalization and AB testing (Ninetailed), AI (AltText.ai), and more. [Integrations]

Does Hygraph provide an API?

Yes, Hygraph provides a powerful GraphQL API for efficient content fetching and management. Detailed API documentation is available for developers. [API Reference]

Where can I find technical documentation for Hygraph?

Comprehensive technical documentation for Hygraph, including guides on building and deploying projects, is available at Hygraph Documentation.

How does Hygraph optimize content delivery performance?

Hygraph is designed for optimized content delivery, ensuring rapid distribution and responsiveness. This improves user experience, engagement, and search engine rankings by reducing bounce rates and increasing conversions. [Performance Details]

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 modernizing their tech stack, and brands scaling across geographies or re-platforming from traditional solutions. [Source]

What industries are represented in Hygraph's case studies?

Hygraph's case studies span industries such as food and beverage (Dr. Oetker), consumer electronics (Samsung), automotive (AutoWeb), healthcare (Vision Healthcare), travel and hospitality (HolidayCheck), media and publishing, eCommerce, SaaS (Bellhop), marketplace, education technology, and wellness and fitness. [Case Studies]

What business impact can customers expect from using Hygraph?

Customers can expect time savings through streamlined workflows, ease of use with an intuitive interface, faster speed-to-market, and enhanced customer experience via consistent and scalable content delivery. These benefits help businesses modernize their tech stack and achieve operational efficiency. [Source]

Can you share some customer success stories with 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 on the Hygraph product page.

How quickly can customers 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 Hygraph's documentation and onboarding guides. [Top Villas Case Study]

Pain Points & Solutions

What problems does Hygraph solve?

Hygraph addresses operational pains (reducing reliance on developers, modernizing legacy tech stacks, supporting global teams, improving content creation UX), financial pains (lowering operational costs, speeding time-to-market, reducing maintenance, supporting scalability), and technical pains (simplifying development, streamlining queries, resolving cache and integration issues). [Product Page]

How does Hygraph solve pain points for different personas?

For developers, Hygraph reduces boilerplate code and streamlines query management. For content creators and project managers, it offers an intuitive interface for independent content updates. For business stakeholders, it lowers operational costs, supports scalability, and accelerates speed to market. [Product Page]

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

Key KPIs include time saved on content updates, system uptime, content consistency across regions, user satisfaction scores, reduction in operational costs, time to market, maintenance costs, and scalability metrics. [CMS KPI Blog]

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 for users. [Security Features]

What security features does Hygraph offer?

Hygraph provides SSO integrations, audit logs, encryption at rest and in transit, and sandbox environments to protect sensitive data and meet regulatory standards. [Security Features]

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.

Support & Implementation

What support does Hygraph offer after purchase?

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, and a community Slack channel. [Contact Page]

What training and onboarding resources are available for new Hygraph users?

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

How easy is it to get started with Hygraph?

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

Customer Proof & Recognition

Who are some of Hygraph's customers?

Notable customers include Sennheiser, Holidaycheck, Ancestry, Samsung, Dr. Oetker, Epic Games, Bandai Namco, Gamescom, Leo Vegas, and Clayton Homes. [Case Studies]

What feedback have customers given about Hygraph's ease of use?

Customers have praised Hygraph for its intuitive and user-friendly interface, noting that it is 'super easy to set up and use' and accessible for both technical and non-technical users. [Source]

Competition & Differentiation

How does Hygraph differentiate itself from other CMS platforms?

Hygraph stands out with its GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, scalability, and user-friendly interface. It addresses operational, financial, and technical pain points more effectively than traditional CMS platforms, offering flexibility, lower costs, and faster speed-to-market. [Product Page]

Webinar Event: How to Avoid Personalization Tech Traps

Boost your editorial experience with distributed content management

Let your editors work in the systems they like while maintaining strong API and content standards
Bryan Robinson

Written by Bryan 

Aug 28, 2023
Boost your editorial experience with distributed content management

Tools are only good if users want to use them. If your writers and editors don’t want to use a tool, your content velocity will halt, and your business will suffer.

While it’s easy to dictate a monolithic approach to building your CMS strategy, managing a diverse team with diverse needs in their content generation processes is not always easy. Rarely will one data entry process be the correct one for all those individuals.

It's important to note that while allowing your writers and editors to choose their tools can increase content velocity, it's also important to maintain some standardization of data structures and APIs. Without that standardization, your developer velocity will suffer.

#What is distributed content management?

Distributed content management is a pattern where your content is spread amongst the systems that work with that content type the best. Your marketing copy lives in a headless CMS; your product information in your PIM; your inventory in your WMS; your customers in your CRM. Each system handles its own data type better than a monolithic approach could.

Each data type also has its own specific group of editors. These editors are most comfortable in the systems they’re trained to deal with. Forcing an eCommerce expert into a headless CMS or a marketing expert into a PIM just for the sake of having a singular tool doesn’t make sense and will often stifle the teams needed to continue refining and producing content.

The distributed CMS pattern means each editor type can use the system that works best for their data. The data is then all brought together via a federation pattern — here at Hygraph, we’re believers in Content Federation, but any data combination pattern will work depending on your needs.

#Why should you care about content velocity?

Among many teams, content reigns supreme. Strong content published regularly is crucial for long-tail leads, thought leadership, and brand growth.

Regularly creating fresh, new content can help keep your audience engaged and growing. While a single strong piece of content can provide high value, each new content piece is a chance to find a bigger, more engaged audience.

Creating a steady stream of new content pieces also allows for a stronger sense of experimentation. In the realm of content, what works one week may not work the next. Trying new perspectives, content types, and tones is important. Experimentation increases the chance of hitting the right tone and perspective to generate high engagement. Not every piece will succeed, which is why it’s so important to be able to create and experiment at a high velocity.

#The importance of content standardization

Content velocity might increase, but there are potential pitfalls to a distributed CMS approach that centers on the idea of standardization.

Unified Content Strategy

When you lose a centralized tool, it’s easy to let strategic concerns slip in favor of “getting the work done.” Any content plan needs a solid strategy as its base. While that can be covered up by a strong centralized tool, holes in internal workflows and strategies become more apparent when decentralized.

When crafting a decentralized solution, it’s important to start with a set of standards for how all aspects will be crafted. This goes from things like tags on blog posts and articles to how products are referenced. A strong plan for this content will align everyone in your organization around how these elements should be written, edited, and used regardless of the system they use. A strong plan will also help create a stronger sense of technological standardization.

Technological standardization

While allowing your writers and editors to choose their tools is important, it's equally important to maintain some standardization in your data structures and APIs. This will ensure that your developer velocity doesn't suffer and that your content can be easily integrated into your CMS.

Given three content teams with three separate CMSs, chances are good that your development team will struggle with creating consistent, efficient, and performant applications and sites. Each CMS brings its own data structures, its own API endpoints, and its own content strategy. Those can’t be standardized in their individual applications; a central system must standardize them. Without a standardization mechanism, site and application development will be more prone to bugs, developer frustrations, and blockers.

How a distributed system can help with standards

Each system may be separate, but each can help enforce the standards of the others.

For example, Dr. Oetker, a global food and beverage wholesaler, has multiple systems that need to converge to make their various localized websites, customer data needs, product information, and recipe database.

While all of these systems could theoretically exist within one massive, monolithic structure, each system is better at maintaining the individual standards of its own content than could happen in a singular system.

Dr. Oetker’s product information lives within their PIM. The PIM provides product data for the recipe database and editorial CMS. Customer data is housed in Force.com. Page data and content structure are built in Hygraph, where editors also work. All this is bundled and built with Next.js for 40 localized websites.

A recipe editor won’t be editing the product information. Since that lives in the PIM, it’s completely safe and standardized. Same for building editorial content or pages. All the product information is usable and standardized without having to worry about the individual teams knowing exactly the right information.

We leave room for error or interpretation if we depend on an overall strategy and the humans implementing them in separate systems. However, if the information is pulled directly from the PIM or WMS systems for use in the others, then the standards set by the PIM or WMS team are automatically enforced for all other teams.

Reduced training time and costs

When you dictate the tools that your writers and editors use, you must provide training and support for those tools. This can be time-consuming and expensive, especially if you have a large team. Instead, if you work with your teams and allow them to collaborate and help craft the editing experience, including the tools, you can gain buy-in and drastically reduce training time and costs. When drafting a content architecture and strategy, involving your editors as early as possible can help save on inconsistencies later.

Since your team is already familiar with those tools, they won't require as much training, and you won't need to spend as much on support. This can free up more time and resources for other critical tasks, such as content strategy and distribution.

#Setting a distributed CMS

While a multi-CMS approach may feel like it adds a lot of overhead or orchestration, it’s possible to set this up in a real-world approach with relatively little effort.

In the past, this would have required custom orchestration layers. Whether those were hosted middleware functions, content hub approaches, or an incredibly bloated frontend, it often felt insurmountable. We can easily overcome these deficiencies with recent improvements in the federation world. While tools like Apollo made the development of orchestration layers easier, concepts like Content Federation allow for ease of use for developers and non-technical users to create orchestration layers.

With Content Federation, we can craft a system where multiple data sources come together in a low-code or no-code system and allow for data to be remixed in various ways.

An eCommerce experience

Let's look at an eCommerce store as an example of real-world distributed content management. To create an eCommerce experience, we need product information, blog posts, page content, user reviews, and more. No single CMS provides the ideal solution for all these types of data.

Product information is often best housed in your product information management (PIM) solution — Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, etc. These PIMs are great for eCommerce data but are notoriously bad for marketing content and are often not fully featured enough for complex inventory management, where a warehouse management solution (WMS) would be a better tool.

Blog Image - Boost your editorial experience with distributed content management.png

When crafting marketing pages, you’ll want a CMS with a solid foundation of both data and content and the ability to combine those in some form of page-building system. We may be biased, but Hygraph is a great solution here.

Finally, your content team may already have a blog in a system like WordPress. Say what you will about WordPress, but it’s still a solid blogging experience. Its page-building experience is weak, as is its PIM experience.

Each of these platforms offers specific perks and deficiencies. Combining all of them together can create a great experience for all editors involved. Let’s make sure it’s also a great experience for developers by combining all of the necessary data into one API.

Using Hygraph’s Remote Sources functionality, we can pull all the data from our PIM for product details, inventory levels from our WMS, and all the blog posts from WordPress and combine them with marketing data and campaigns stored in Hygraph to create a full API of all the data needed to build experiences across multiple channels.

On top of that, any data can be augmented and constructed in new ways. Products can be added to campaign pages. Specific reviews and blog posts can be built into the homepage (and changed by editors). All of this is unlocked when you use a CMS as your middleware.

#Conclusion

Content velocity, content experimentation, standardized data, and flexible site building are cornerstones to crafting a strong brand image and a strong business. If any one of those pillars is weak, the entire system can crumble. You can gain standardized data by forcing your team into a monolithic approach, but content velocity and experimentation will suffer.

By allowing your team to work in the space they’re most comfortable or where the data is best served, you open up a higher level of velocity and experimentation. With the advent of Content Federation, you don’t suffer from bad data or problematic site-building. One standardized API from customized, efficient, flexible sources.

Blog Author

Bryan Robinson

Bryan Robinson

Head of Developer Relations

Bryan is Hygraph's Head of Developer Relations. He has a strong passion for developer education and experience as well as decoupled architectures, frontend development, and clean design.

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