CDN and Other Features for a Faster and More Secure Web CMS

In our latest release, we have brought some major updates that focus on improving the speed, security, and reliability of Contentstack. Here’s a rundown of the most important changes of this release.

CDN Support

Contentstack is partnering with Fastly—a leading content delivery network (CDN) provider—to provide the benefits of high performance content delivery to users anywhere in the world. Fastly has multiple servers spread across the globe that store duplicated content of your website for lightning fast access to content.

As a result, the visitor of a website powered by Contentstack receives data from the nearest server whenever it’s requested, instead of having to wait for the original server – which may not be the closest and fastest to respond. For instance, a site visitor located in the US will get data from Fastly’s San Jose server, while another visitor from Germany will receive the same data – but from the Frankfurt server. This improves the response time dramatically, as well as providing an additional layer of reliability and resilience.

Language-Based Permissions to Users

To provide more control over your content, we have enabled language-based permission in Contentstack. This feature enables you to allow/restrict users to access and publish content in specific languages in a stack. This can be done by defining roles (with permissions) and assigning these roles to users of your stack.

Note: A stack can be defined as a pool of data or a container that holds all the content/assets related to a site. It is a collaboration space where multiple users can work together to create, edit, approve, and publish content. See a comprehensive definition here.

Master Language Setting

A ‘master language’ is the primary language of your stack. Previously English (United States) was the default, but now you can set your master language to your preference whenever you create a stack. We made this choice as we’ve seen an uptick in international non-English customers.

More Secure and Reliable Webhooks

A WebHook is an HTTP callback: an HTTP POST that occurs when something happens; a simple event-notification via HTTP POST. A web application implementing WebHooks will POST a message to a URL when certain things happen.

Webhooks on Contentstack are now more secure, reliable, and easier to use than ever. We added basic HTTP authentication for an added layer of security to webhooks. we’ve also introduced custom headers in webhooks; think of this feature as an easy way to label them, so if you push code and it has the old webhook you’ll know right away. You can also now check status, view requests and responses of each triggered webhook. Laslty, in case the destination URL isn’t accepting requests due to any reason, Contentstack now makes five consecutive attempts at regular intervals. After this, a user can update it manually.

Validation Rules for Fields

You can now add validation rules for fields so that there are fewer errors and no irrelevant data in your content repository. We have introduced a new property for single-line and multi-line text fields: Validation (regex). It lets you set validation checks for the fields. The validation rules need to be defined using JavaScript regex. An example of validation would be defining regex that checks if the value entered in a field is a valid email address.

Reference to Entries of Same Content Type

We’re pleased to say you can also now reference entries of the same content type. In the case of a creating a blog, if you have blog post A, B, and C under a single content type and wish to reference blog post A in blog post C, then you can now reference that entry under a single Content Type.

For more information and tutorials on these features, refer to our in-depth documentation.