Tactical CMS updates for improved collaboration, publishing & content model flexibility

Recognizing the challenges content teams encounter in collaboration, publishing, and content structuring, we have introduced a series of tactical enhancements designed to bolster collaboration, streamline publishing processes, and provide greater flexibility in content modeling. These enhancements eliminate inefficiencies by making content easier to find, publish, and structure at scale. Let’s dive into how these enhancements can transform your content operations and empower you and your teams to work smarter.

Better search & collaboration with Shared Views

Teams managing multiple types of content often spend significant time repeatedly searching for or manually browsing through similar entries. Shared Views solve this issue by allowing you to create, save, and share pre-filtered search views with your entire team. Whether you're a marketer managing blog or website content or a product manager in charge of product listings, Shared Views ensure everyone is working from the most up-to-date and consistent information.

Key benefits

• Seamless collaboration: Share saved views with specific users or roles, ensuring alignment and uniformity across teams.
• Real-time updates: Any modifications made to a shared view—such as updated filters, column preferences, or sorting— are instantly reflected for all users, maintaining synchronization.
• Improved productivity: By accessing pre-configured views tailored to specific needs, teams can significantly reduce the time spent on repetitive searches.
• Consistency across teams: Standardizing content access and management promotes uniform workflows and reduces inconsistencies.
• Secure and controlled access: Admins and users with appropriate permissions can control who can access and modify shared views, ensuring data security and governance.

Key features

Access and management

• Shared views are easily accessible from the Saved Views section.
• Users can manage permissions, allowing others to either view or edit the shared view.
• A clear UI indication helps users distinguish between personal and shared views.

Notifications

Users receive notifications when a new view is shared with them, ensuring they never miss an important update.

To start using Shared Views today, navigate to your Saved Views section in Contentstack and begin sharing with your team.

Releases updates: Streamlining bulk publishing

Managing large-scale content publishing has historically been a complex endeavor, often hindered by limitations on bulk actions and visibility challenges. With content workflow optimization in mind, we are excited to unveil our new release experience, designed to enhance your release and scheduling experience for large amounts of content items within our CMS. 

The Releases updates aims to simplify the curation and management by offering a preview of your content as it will appear upon publication at any point in time and providing more effective scheduling tools to manage publishing timelines. By making this process more intuitive, we’re making your content releases more approachable and ergonomic to your preferences.

Notable improvements:

• Higher limits: Increased thresholds for bulk actions allow teams to publish more content simultaneously, accelerating deployment timelines.
  • bulk-action-delete: 10
  • bulk-action-workflow: 10
  • bulk-action-publish: 100
  • bulk-action-unpublish: 100
  • bulk-action-add-to-release: 100
• Enhanced visibility: Improved filtering, sorting, and progress tracking provide better oversight of bulk publishing jobs, ensuring greater control and transparency.
• Effective scheduling: Advanced scheduling tools enable precise management of publishing timelines, allowing for coordinated content rollouts.
• Enhanced bulk add to release: Enhanced capability for users to add multiple entries to a release simultaneously. With our upgraded Add-to-Release modal, you can choose your content entries and add them all at once—no more repetitive tasks!
• Robust filtering and sorting: Locating specific releases will be more straightforward than ever. Users can filter releases by Status and Date, enabling quick access to the necessary information. Furthermore, sorting the release list by Modified Date and Created Date provides clarity and helps track updates efficiently.
• Support for multiple locales: In our global marketplace, inclusivity is crucial. With the Releases experience, you can select multiple locales when adding entries to your releases. This effectively tailors your content for your diverse customer and audience base, no matter their location.
• Including nested references: Grasping the relationships between your data is essential. We’ve included support for multiple levels of referenced items within releases. You will be able to seamlessly incorporate nested references, promoting clear connections and improving your project structure.

These enhancements to our publishing workflow empower teams to execute content strategies more efficiently, reducing manual efforts and potential errors.

Expanded content modeling capabilities

A robust content model is foundational to delivering scalable and reusable content. We are introducing several enhancements to our content modeling capabilities, offering developers and content architects greater flexibility.

Key enhancements:

• Increased limits: Higher thresholds on fields, references, and modular blocks allow for more complex and detailed content structures.
  • Number of Management Tokens: Increased from original limit of 10 to default and max limit of 30.
  • Max size of JSON custom fields (in bytes): Increased from original limit of 12000 to default and max limit of 100000.
  • Maximum JSON RTE fields per Content Type: Increased from original limit of 10 to default and max limit of 15.
  • Max number of fields in a Content Type: Increased from previous limit of 400 to default and max limit of 500.
  • Max number of Blocks per 'Modular Blocks' field: Increased from previous limit of 50 to default and max limit of 100.
  • Max Modular Blocks per Entry: Increased from original limit of 30 to default and max limit of 100.
  • Max MultiCT References: Increased from original limit of 100 to default and max limit of 200.
  • Max Content Types per Reference: Normalized up to default limit of 50.
  • Max Asset Folders per Stack: Increased from original limit of 500 to default and max limit of 10000.
• Nested global fields: The introduction of nested global fields will enable more granular and reusable content components, simplifying content management. By enabling nesting within other Global Fields and instances of Modular Blocks, this update will help developers build more reusable, hierarchical structures in their content model, reducing redundancy and improving reusability of fields for content management efficiency.
• Non-localizable fields: Mark individual fields as non-localizable within Group fields or Modular Block, which provides greater control over content variations across different locales, ensuring consistency where needed.
• Mark as Group title: Assign the value of a specific field as the title of a particular Group field. For example, you might have multiple news stories following the same schema when creating a news app. To distinguish between these multiple stories, you can set the field assigned for "Headline" as the title of the Group field, as shown below.
  Learn more here.
  
  

Looking ahead

Content management remains the backbone of any successful digital strategy, even as we evolve into a more comprehensive digital experience platform (DXP). It’s no secret that we’ve expanded our capabilities with real-time personalization powered by our customer data platform (CDP) and personalization engine, but a strong, flexible CMS remains foundational. These tactical updates are part of a broader initiative to provide you with tools that improve your current workflows and anticipate future content management challenges.

Integrating these tactical CMS improvements with our broader DXP capabilities will allow you to create more dynamic, personalized experiences without sacrificing operational efficiency. Shared Views help you and your teams align on structured content discovery, the Releases updates streamlines publishing at scale, and expanded content modeling capabilities provide the flexibility needed to build future-ready digital experiences. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, these enhancements will ensure you stay well-equipped to deliver engaging and consistent content experiences across all channels.

If you’d like to learn more about these tactical enhancements to our CMS, please join us on March 25 for our Pulse Spring Recap Webinar to see all of it in action (and much more). These small but impactful updates make finding, structuring, and publishing content at scale easier.