Frequently Asked Questions

Product Information & Content Graph

What is the content graph and how does it work?

The content graph is a framework that enables developers to query multiple sources of information through a single unified hub. It federates content, centralizes content strategy, and standardizes querying processes using GraphQL schemas. This approach simplifies API interactions, ensures consistency, and eliminates siloed information, maximizing efficiency and scalability. The content graph does not store or duplicate data; instead, it creates a schema and allows developers to query data via the graph’s endpoint. For more details, see The Content Graph is the Future (Dec 5, 2023).

What are the main benefits of using the content graph?

The content graph offers improved content discoverability and accessibility due to strongly typed GraphQL schemas. It enables querying only the needed data from any source in a unified way, supports efficient content updates and real-time synchronization via TTL or webhook cache purging, and facilitates seamless integration with various digital platforms without creating technical debt. No data duplication occurs, and front-end implementation remains simple. Source: The Content Graph is the Future.

What challenges should I consider when implementing a content graph?

Challenges include dealing with legacy API formats and complex data cleansing needs. Legacy APIs may be less strict and change over time, requiring mature data governance and tooling before integrating with a content graph. Defensive coding and data cleanup may be necessary prior to pushing content into the graph. Source: The Content Graph is the Future.

How does Hygraph use GraphQL in its content graph?

Hygraph uses GraphQL as the query language for its content graph. This enables strongly typed data structures, introspection, and standardized querying. Hygraph’s framework absorbs any data structure and converts it into a GraphQL schema using SDL, allowing developers to query all information from the CMS and any federated source through a single endpoint. Source: The Content Graph is the Future.

Can you provide a real-life use case for the content graph?

A real-life use case is composable commerce, where multiple systems (PIM, DAM, CMS, commerce engine) are integrated via the content graph. For example, a telecom shop can use the content graph to aggregate product information, media assets, and commerce data from different sources, enabling seamless querying and front-end implementation. Legacy systems can be federated into the graph and phased out gradually. Source: The Content Graph is the Future.

Features & Capabilities

What features does Hygraph offer?

Hygraph provides a GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, scalability, and integrations with platforms like Netlify, Vercel, Shopify, BigCommerce, AWS S3, Cloudinary, and more. It supports localization, digital asset management, personalization, and AI integrations. For a full list, visit Hygraph Features and Hygraph Integrations.

Does Hygraph provide an API?

Yes, Hygraph offers a powerful GraphQL API for efficient content fetching and management. Learn more at Hygraph API Reference.

How does Hygraph optimize content delivery performance?

Hygraph emphasizes optimized content delivery performance, ensuring rapid content distribution and responsiveness. This reduces bounce rates and increases conversions by improving user experience and engagement. For more details, visit this page.

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 more details, visit the pricing page.

Security & Compliance

What security and compliance certifications does Hygraph have?

Hygraph is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, ISO 27001 certified, and GDPR compliant. It offers features like SSO integrations, audit logs, encryption at rest and in transit, and sandbox environments to protect sensitive data. For more details, visit Hygraph Security Features.

Use Cases & Customer Success

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. Companies that benefit most include modern software companies, enterprises seeking to modernize, and brands aiming to scale across geographies or improve development velocity. Source: ICPVersion2_Hailey.pdf.

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. See Hygraph Case Studies.

Can you share specific customer success stories?

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 at Hygraph Customer Stories.

Pain Points & Solutions

What problems does Hygraph solve?

Hygraph addresses operational pains (reliance on developers for content updates, outdated tech stacks, conflicting global team needs, 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). For more details, visit Hygraph Product Page.

How does Hygraph solve these pain points?

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, accelerates speed-to-market, minimizes maintenance expenses, and supports scalability. It also simplifies development by reducing boilerplate code and streamlining query management. Source: Hygraph Product Page.

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

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

Technical Requirements & Documentation

Where can I find technical documentation for Hygraph?

Comprehensive technical documentation is available at Hygraph Documentation, covering building and deploying projects.

Support & Implementation

What support is available after purchasing Hygraph?

Hygraph offers 24/7 support via chat, email, and phone. Enterprise customers receive dedicated onboarding and expert guidance. All users can access documentation, video tutorials, and the community Slack channel. For more details, visit Hygraph Contact Page.

How easy is it to get started with Hygraph?

Hygraph is designed for easy onboarding, even for non-technical users. For example, Top Villas launched a new project in just 2 months. Users can sign up for a free account and access documentation and onboarding guides. Learn more at Hygraph Documentation and Top Villas Case Study.

What training and technical support does Hygraph provide?

Hygraph offers 24/7 support, onboarding sessions for enterprise customers, training resources (video tutorials, documentation, webinars), and Customer Success Managers for expert guidance. For more details, visit Hygraph Contact Page.

Customer Proof & Recognition

Who are some of Hygraph's customers?

Hygraph is trusted by brands such as Sennheiser, Holidaycheck, Ancestry, Samsung, Dr. Oetker, Epic Games, Bandai Namco, Gamescom, Leo Vegas, and Clayton Homes. For more details and logos, visit Hygraph Case Studies.

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

Customers praise Hygraph for its intuitive interface and ease of use, noting that even non-technical users can start using it right away. The user interface is described as logical and user-friendly, making it accessible for both technical and non-technical teams. Source: Try Hygraph.

Vision & Future

What is Hygraph's vision for the future of content management?

Hygraph envisions the future of content as one big graph, where brand domain content and origin sources contribute to a unified graph, enabling various channels to query and retrieve needed data. The mission is to remove traditional content management pain points through its GraphQL-native architecture, empowering businesses to create impactful digital experiences. Source: About Us and The Content Graph is the Future.

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The content graph is the future

Content management is as essential as it is complex, especially at scale. In this article, I will introduce an elegant solution to this problem: the content graph.
Tim Benniks

Written by Tim 

Dec 05, 2023
Mobile image

Content management is as essential as it is complex, especially at scale. As brands grow, they often use a mix of different services to manage their domain content, such as PIM, DAM, Search, and legacy CMS. Unfortunately, this approach challenges developers who must connect all the data to make it presentable on websites or apps, resulting in technical debt. In this article, I will introduce an elegant solution to this problem: the content graph.

#The emergence of new buzzwords: best-of-breed and composable

Organizations worldwide are increasingly adopting a composable architecture that incorporates best-of-breed tools. Simply put, they use a combination of tools with a small scope that do exactly what they need. This approach enables developers to select and integrate smaller tools for each specific function, providing enhanced flexibility and scalability.

A best-of-breed product is a specialized service that is considered the best in its specific category. These products are chosen for their unique strengths and seamless integration with other tools or systems in a composable architecture. This allows organizations to create a customized and optimized solution that meets their specific needs.

Unlike monolithic DXPs (off-the-shelf products), which can be inflexible and restrict customization, composable architectures enable organizations to adapt to their specific requirements and take advantage of the latest technological advancements.

If you want to learn more details about industry buzzwords, check out this blog post.

#It’s not all sunshine and rainbows

Composable architectures offer a lot of freedom but also introduce a significant amount of complexity. While it may feel liberating for developers to choose how they connect to services, when dealing with large-scale applications, combining data from different structures and using unfamiliar SDKs can quickly become disastrous.

Composable challenges

#Introducing the content graph

The content graph is a framework that is represented in the form of a graph, and enables developers to query multiple sources of information through a single unified hub.

The graph approach federates content, centralizes content strategy, and standardizes querying processes. This simplifies API interactions, ensures consistency, and eliminates siloed information, maximizing efficiency and scalability. It achieves all these tasks while avoiding data duplication and maintaining the autonomy of the sources.

In human words, this means that all content coming from best-of-breed sources is fed into an aggregation layer (the graph), which can be redistributed in a way that is easy to query. This layer standardizes the language used to query content and allows you to ask for only specific bits rather than receiving everything.

An essential part of this approach is that the content graph doesn’t store or duplicate any data; it merely creates a schema and allows developers to query the data via the graph’s endpoint. This allows the best-of-breed sources that connect to it to be fully autonomous and flexible.

To ensure everything performs well while asking the graph for data (imagine having a slow legacy system as a content source), the content graph stores query results on the CDN edge and offers specific TTL and webhook functionalities.

Content graph

#The benefits

Use these one-liners when you talk about this subject to your boss.

  • The content graph offers improved content discoverability and accessibility due to strongly typed GraphQL schemas.
  • With the content graph, you query only what you need from any source and in the same unified way.
  • The content graph offers efficient content updates and real-time synchronization due to TTL or webhook cache purging when sources update. No data duplication is happening at all.
  • The content graph facilitates seamless integration with various digital platforms and channels without creating technical debt on the implementation side. In human words, it keeps the front-end implementation simple.

#Challenges and considerations

This article wouldn’t be complete without mentioning some of the challenges. Some implementation hurdles might be due to legacy API formats or highly complex data cleansing needs. Legacy APIs tend to be less strict and might change over time. If you need to clean up that data or add a lot of defensive code, you need to find a tool to do that first before pushing the content into the graph. This means your data governance and tooling must mature before using a content graph.

#The tech behind the content graph

You might have guessed it: the content graph uses GraphQL as its query language. Using GraphQL enhances the experience for developers as it uses strongly typed data structures, allowing codebases to do introspection and learn instantly what type of data can be queried and in what format. The content graph framework absorbs any data structure and makes it into a GraphQL schema via a language called SDL.

An interesting use case is that of Hygraph, which is a GraphQL headless CMS first but with a content graph implementation on the side. This allows content editors to use external content federated into the graph in native CMS schemas without understanding where that data came from. Developers only need to query Hygraph to get all information from the CMS and whatever source was plugged into it.

#A real-life use case for the content graph

An example of using a content graph is that of composable commerce. Imagine operating a large shop selling telecom-related products. As these types of products are complex to manage, companies use a PIM system to enrich product information and manage connections between bundles and brands.

Of course, end users have to be able to search, filter, and order the products when researching what they want to buy. For this, you will likely need another tool to index all products to prepare them for searching.

Each product has a media-rich and elaborate story that generally resides on the product page or a campaign page around a product range. To be able to make this happen, you need a CMS to compose the content and, most likely, a DAM system to store all the original formats of the media you might use.

Lastly, end users must be able to make an account, buy, add to their wishlist, and favorite the products. For that, you need a commerce engine.

The beauty is that all these systems output data that can be ingested by the content graph, allowing developers to query only the graph while using GraphQL. The specialists your brand hires can operate the external tools as usual. Want to add a wishlist or switch our PIM systems? Add it to the graph; the front-end implementation code must not change.

One more consideration: if you have a legacy system in place, it can be federated into the content graph while staying autonomous and operating normally. Developers on the implementation end do not need to query the system but ask the graph for its content instead. This gives you the ability to phase it out slowly.

#Conclusion

The content graph might sound like a concept out of a sci-fi movie, but it’s already here and ready to use. In fact, I think this might be the technical solution for most composable architectures.

Want to learn more? Reach out or join us on Slack.

Blog Author

Tim Benniks

Tim Benniks

Developer Relations Lead

Tim is Developer Relations Lead at Hygraph with a focus on developer relations, community building, and content creation. He’s active in the developer community through speaking engagements at conferences and creation of YouTube videos on modern technologies. Tim collaborates regularly with startups like Cloudinary, Supabase, Algolia, HeyGen, and NuxtJS, and is a member of the MACH Alliance Tech Council. It's all about quality, community, and development of great websites.

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