Contentful is a cloud based CMS solution that provides the ability to manage content across multiple platforms.The editing interface allows for managing content interactively and provides developers the ability to deliver the content with the programming language and template framework of their choice.
Contentful is easy and fast and cheap. I went from zero experience to loading data out of my contentful space in about an hour or more. The cost is very reasonable and compared to options like CloudCMS are a fraction of the cost. The benefit is that with a lower cost entry …
It is suitable for making portable applications, with almost the same code for several platforms. You can access native features of the device or use an open source plug-in from the repository to create a local database and access the internal storage of the device. It is wonderful for the construction of a native application, through the use of standard web code. It is not recommended for enterprise applications.
Well suited for our needs of multiple images for auto auctions from a variety of sellers. Pointing them to one platform is easier than attempting to use a variety of platforms as we were doing before (email, slack, Dropbox and Google Drive would randomly be used by a variety of employees )
Cordova makes it very easy to develop apps for multiple platforms. The setup is very simple when it comes to creating a project, adding platforms, building and deploying apps. If you have a little mobile app development experience, all you need to know is HTML, CSS, Javascript and only a handful of cordova commands to get started with your hybrid app.
Cordova provides a simple solution to access any and all of the device features through native plugins. You have a host of third-party and cordova plugins available to use device features like filesystem, camera, health kit, location services etc. You can also write your very own plugins and use them for your cordova based apps.
Cordova is free to use! The only cost you will bear is the individual mobile platform developer program enrollment cost to deploy your apps to those platforms.
Contentful uses "references" to allow you to build very modular content. If I have a "slider" content type, I can create a "slide" content type which references a "button" content type, and so forth. This works well, but I occasionally wish there was a better solution for one-off content, like a settings page. Currently, this is done for creating an entire content type called "settings" with a single entry. Not a big deal, but not ideal, either.
There are a few quirks with GatsbyJS integration, etc, but these issues are being fixed and improved upon very quickly.
A minor gripe, but Contentful does not have a way to organize fields within an entry. Entries with many fields are somewhat tiresome to scroll through.
Apache Cordova is the mother of all other frameworks. The Ionic developed framework is well suited for development but most of their features are offered by paid services. As Apache Cordova is open source and has a license to modify it, it has no legal problems to work with it. Also, most well-known IDEs recognize the Apache Cordova snippets.
In the past we've used WordPress to manage documentation content. WordPress was more flexible than Contentful but also prone to inconsistencies and we ended having a lot of hacks to accomplish various WordPress tricks. With Contentful there's less ambiguity so content producers are less likely to go astray. We also have our own in-house programmatic template solution for managing content, but this was a previous pain point when we needed to get the dev team to do a deploy for every content change.
It has a positive impact in general. Cordova is really a great solution for web developers who want to bring their incredible ideas to devices, but they just do not have a lot of time to put into iOS and Android learning curves.
Our biggest benefit was that the management of images for multiple devices.
Developing with Cordova has drastically reduced the cost of cross-platform deployment.
