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.
$489
React
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces. React enables users to create interactive UIs. Design simple views for each state in an application, and React will update and render just the right components when data changes. React is available free and open source under the MIT license.
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 )
React is a JavaScript user interface construction library that works well for:
Developing web apps with dynamic and complicated user interfaces.
creating reusable UI elements that may be used in other applications.
creating single-page applications with dynamic content updates that don't require a page reload.
The Virtual DOM's effective updating mechanism allows it to handle large volumes of data updates.
React, on the other hand, might be less suitable for:
Websites that are simple, stagnant, and have no interaction. Other libraries or simple HTML, CSS, and JavaScript may be a better fit in such circumstances.
Web sockets may be a better choice for applications that need real-time updates, such as chat or gaming apps.
When creating mobile apps, React Native is a better option.
Server side rendering only, as React is designed to run on the client side.
React is fantastic for building performant user interfaces. Our web app is snappy and great for our customers.
React has the philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well which is the view layer of the application. This makes it incredibly intuitive and flexible for developers to use.
React has lead the way in being able to write modular and structured code. It is a drastic improvement since the days of spaghetti jQuery code.
React has an unmatched community. The amount of tools and libraries available is fantastic, and there plenty of solutions available online for common problems.
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.
Debugging React is challenging. Bugs in react code generate stack traces internal to React and it is often totally unclear how it relates to the code you actually wrote.
Relating your React elements to corresponding DOM elements is difficult. The intentional separation of virtual and actual DOM also makes it difficult to map the elements to the structures in the DOM. This is partially ameliorated by the use of the React dev tool, which provides a DOM-like view of the React elements, but the tool still does not provide a direct correspondence with the DOM that is often necessary to figure out why something isn't right.
Because JSX is React-specific and not a language feature, a special compilation process is necessary to convert JSX code to normal JS. Coming from a C++ background, compiling things doesn't bother me, but many JS developers are used to a less structured development.
React is just a bit of a different animal. I was avoiding it for the longest time. I thought for sure I would land on Vue or something else with a more approachable and familiar appearance. But after taking an online course in React, I started realize what people were raving about (and complaining about) and decided to implement it at our office for one of our products.
Since it's open-source and very popular, the community support for React and related tools and libraries is excellent. There are a lot of people using the same tools, and so issues tend to get fixed quickly and "recipes" are easy to come by. And since it's backed by Facebook, they have a dedicated engineering team working on the progression of React.
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.
While this is a widely contested debate with various blog posts and benchmarks all over the place, its really a personal choice to determine what works for the team. Coming from a Angular 1.x background, I decided to try a new framework when Angular 2.x was announced and at that time React is gaining popularity and Vue hasn't taken off yet. Compared to Angular 1.x and Vue (hybrid of React and Angular) that split the logic from the html templates, I loved the way React breaks code into components using the jsx syntax. In my mind, this allows for cleaner components and easier maintenance
