Mapped empowers lean team with headless CMS

Mapped is an AI-powered data infrastructure platform for IoT (internet of things) that can automatically discover and normalize data from systems, devices, and cloud applications to provide customers with one simple, secure, and reliable API for all their assets. As the company launched, Mapped needed a content management solution (CMS) that made it easy for a small team to quickly create and easily maintain the marketing and customer sites.

Having worked with Contentstack before, Bruno Genaro, senior software engineer, and Justin Dupree, vice president of Customer Success, were confident they could launch Mapped’s customer experience quickly with the headless CMS.

“We knew what Contentstack could do, and we knew how to implement it,” Dupree said. “So it’s been really easy to get up and going.”

Contentstack’s user-friendly interface and API-first structure make it easy for a lean team of Bruno, Justin and a front-end developer to create and manage the experience on mapped.com and the logged-in customer console.

Make and see changes instantly

Mapped uses Next.js, React and GraphQL to build their front end. At first, static site generation was used to cache on the content delivery network (CDN) and show the data all at once. Then the team started to use two Contentstack publishing environments, one to preview work (development) and one for published content (production).

Each environment has its own API key, but the static site generation wasn’t able to fetch data using multiple keys. The solution was to switch to dynamic imports that splits up codes into modules that can be quickly cached within the different environments.

“Before, we had to wait for the entire static page to regenerate, which could take up to five minutes,” Genaro said. “Now we can directly change something in either production or development and see it right away. It’s much more straightforward.”

Interactive custom content

Documentation is the main type of content created for Mapped customers. To make it more interactive, the team created a custom solution that leverages Contentstack’s structured, presentation-neutral way of storing content.

“We’ve put some tags into the Markdown so that we can display different types of code that will actually run in the website, versus being a static list,” Dupree explained.

To do this, Genaro added logic to the front end.

“We parse from our side, identify if the code needs to be run or not, and then can run it in real time and see the response,” he said. “It really takes advantage of how Contentstack delivers this content.”

SaaS peace of mind

Contentstack is delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS), a model that gives companies access to cloud-based services that can scale as needed, while the vendor takes care of hosting and maintaining the cloud infrastructure.

“It makes sense for us to have a vendor-hosted CMS solution,” Genaro said. “It lets us rely on the performance of Contentstack’s servers, CDN, availability and everything else.” “With Contentstack, I have less things to worry about, especially infrastructure,” he said.