End-of-Year 2024 Platform Recap: What we accomplished and what’s next

As we approach the end of 2024, we’re excited to recap pivotal enhancements we’ve made to the Contentstack platform this year. Key highlights from this year included the unveiling of our personalization engine, Personalize, built natively into the CMS to solve personalization at scale. Followed shortly after with the introduction of a brand new set of visual building tools meant to bolster the content authoring experience in our CMS. These updates reflect our unwavering commitment to providing brands with cutting-edge tools to create unique digital experiences.

Let’s dive into this year’s key releases for each product area of the Contentstack platform:

Contentstack by the numbers:

• 635 Billion API requests

• 1,720 Releases

Headless CMS:

• New search experience: Based on your valuable feedback, we've reimagined our search capabilities. This upgrade brings a fresh look and feel to the search experience within our CMS, along with powerful new features like granular filtering and custom views designed to help you find content faster and more efficiently than ever before.
  

• Visual Builder: We’ve retained all the benefits of a headless CMS and combined it with a powerful set of visual tools that enable you to easily create content with speed and flexibility for any type of content experience.
  

• Timeline: Managing future content updates can be challenging, especially in large-scale organizations where changes must be coordinated across multiple teams and regions. That's why we introduced Timeline in July. This new previewing experience allows you to navigate through a visual timeline of your content, providing a clear view of future updates and changes. Leveraging Personalize in tandem, you can even preview future content based on audience data to see how it will appear to different audience segments.
  

• Variants: This powerful new feature built into our CMS allows you to intuitively access and adjust your content for different audience segments directly within the entry editor, minimizing content duplication and maximizing content reuse.
  

• Taxonomy-based Permissions: With Taxonomy-based Permissions, stack owners, admins, and developers now have more flexible permissions to finely tune user access to entries based on specific taxonomies and terms. This allows for granular access control, safeguarding of sensitive data, operational efficiency, and enhanced scalability.
  

• Bulk Add: To meet the growing needs of your large-scale content operations, we've launched the Bulk Add feature. This enables you to manage up to 50,000 items concurrently, greatly boosting efficiency for teams managing extensive content volumes.

Automate:

• Marketplace Automate app: The Marketplace Automate app now integrates Automate into the CMS user experience, allowing you to access and execute automations from Automate right within the content entry sidebar. This is especially useful for running automations on-demand, giving you flexibility beyond scheduled or automated triggers.

• Automation sharing: Automations can now be easily shared between organizations using shareable recipe links. This feature streamlines collaboration and knowledge transfer while offering options to include or exclude Project Variables to protect sensitive information.

Launch:

• Expanded hosting support for popular frameworks: To provide a one-stop solution for hosting websites, we’ve expanded Launch's support to include the most popular frameworks. With this latest update, Launch now seamlessly supports Vue, Create React App, Angular, and CSR (Client-Side Rendered) frameworks. This enhancement will empower more developers to effortlessly deploy and manage their web projects with unparalleled ease and efficiency.

• Edge functions: In May, we released Edge functions for Launch. Edge functions represent a paradigm shift in how applications are built and deployed, moving computation from centralized servers to the edge of the network, enabling you to execute code closer to your end-users’ locations. A common use case can be serving personalized content tailored to individuals based on location or preferences in real-time.

• CDN cache revalidation: We have improved the Content Delivery Network (CDN) to actively check the validity of cached content, ensuring it is updated from the origin server when necessary. This change guarantees that visitors are presented with the most current content reflecting any recent updates.

• The first and only truly multi-cloud frontend hosting platform: In December, Launch was made available on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). You no longer have to think about which products are available on which clouds, and choose any data center you want to host your content.

Personalize:

• Audience Segmentation: In June, we introduced advanced audience targeting capabilities within our personalization engine that enable you to create tailored experiences that build meaningful connections with your audiences. You can leverage the power of Variants to scale content operations across all customer segments, ensuring each audience receives relevant, engaging experiences.

• A/B/n Testing: We also announced A/B/n testing, which enables you to run and test experiments on your content variations. By leveraging analytics and algorithms, you can discover which variations resonate best with various audience segments.

• CDP Integrations: Personalize also integrates with top Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) like Twilio Segment. This integration allows for precise content personalization driven by both first- and third-party data.

Contentstack AI:

• AI Connectors: We’ve added support for new AI connectors in Automate, integrating with popular AI vendors like ChatGPT, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Gemini. These connectors are perfect for intelligently automating routine tasks, ensuring both accuracy and consistency in areas where AI excels.

• Brand Kit: Our new AI-driven Brand Kit is designed to maintain brand voice consistency across all your content, ensuring alignment with brand guidelines and enabling you to move from generic GenAI to brand-aware GenAI. With Knowledge Vaults, you can centralize key brand assets and create Voice Profiles to set specific rules for tone, style, and language, shaping AI to fit your business and audiences. The Playground also offers you a safe environment to experiment with new ideas, voice profiles, or integrations without risking live content.

Developer Hub

• General Availability: In January, we announced general availability for Developer Hub, an intuitive interface that provides our technical audience an environment to easily create and manage custom applications, making it an ideal tool for developers and partners looking to enhance or extend their Contentstack platform experience with personalized integrations and capabilities, whether for internal or even public use.

• M2M Contentstack applications: In September, we introduced new ways to extend and enhance your Contentstack experience with Machine to Machine (M2M) applications. Designed for server-to-server communication, M2M apps automate tasks like data syncing and backend jobs, ensuring smooth data flow between Contentstack and third-party systems. These new capabilities empower developers and teams to streamline workflows and enhance platform functionality.

Platform Updates:

• UI enhancements: In an effort to unify and elevate our platform's capabilities, we implemented several significant enhancements to the platform user interface back in January. These improvements have been thoughtfully designed to simplify content management, enabling you to navigate faster to what you need and make your workflows more flexible. Additionally, our revamped workflows are now more adaptable, allowing you to scale your content operations seamlessly as your business evolves and expands.

• Analytics API: In October, we released a powerful Analytics API that grants access to rich data from the Mission Control dashboard and Product Analytics module. The new Analytics API provides access to data about Contentstack utilization, including subscription usage, device usage, product usage, top URLs, status codes, and cache usage. You can now integrate this data into your favorite BI tools, fostering the creation of tailored insights for specific objectives. Moreover, it supports advanced scenarios like automated report generation and monthly comparisons, all enhanced by built-in LLM capabilities.

• Added support for GCP North America: In May, we announced a new data center for Google Cloud Front North America (GCP NA). Contentstack customers can enjoy the flexibility of choosing from different data centers, giving you a choice to choose from a wider range of regions by different cloud providers for your Contentstack data storage.

• CLI enhancements: All throughout the year, we’ve been making significant enhancements to the Command-Line Interface (CLI). A few key highlights include: added support for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in the Launch plugin, support for Personalize and Variants in the import and export CLI plugins, bulk publishing of variants in the Bulk Publish plugin, and much more.
  

This rundown is only a snapshot of the remarkable developments we accomplished this year. It’s a testament to our dedication to empowering users with efficient, personalized, and scalable tools. As we look ahead to 2025, we hope to continue our pursuit of innovation in a rapidly evolving digital landscape and remain committed to striving to meet the evolving needs of our customers and user community. We welcome your thoughts and feedback on these exciting updates. See you in 2025!