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.