Finding your content
Your mantra from this day forth should be Let go of the tree. If you’ve worked on other CMSs before, chances are good you navigated a tree hierarchy to find your pages, assets, files and so on.
Contentful is different. It’s a flat, non-hierarchical sea of content blocks, all linked together to form other content including pages. Some content is nested within other content, like an image within a content card or a banner within a page – but there is no real hierarchy between content. It’s all just linked together, if that makes sense.
Which means if we’re going to look through this vast, flat expanse for our content, Contentful better have a great search – and it does. Whether it’s the main content list on the dashboard (image below), finding a destination page when creating a hyperlink, or looking for a media asset to add to a page, Contentful’s search is strong in 3 ways:
It’s effortless and quick. Using a combination of the content type dropdown and a few characters of a keyword, the CMS will return what you’re looking for without even hitting enter.
It’s contextual. This means Contentful will only show you search results for the content that fits where you’re trying to add it. You’ll get the hang of it.
Filters are ever-present. For any search you make, you’ll have the option to filter by many criteria: date first published or last updated, author, entry ID, title and many more.
Searching the full list
In the dashboard’s main content list you’ll see every content entry that’s been created in your space, in either published, changed or draft state. The power tools for finding your content quickly and reliably are:
Content type dropdown - If you need to find an Advice page for instance, change the dropdown to Page –Advice to view only those content entries for that type. Same for any other content type.
Keyword search - Anywhere in Contentful you need to search for content, once you start to type the first characters of a keyword, the content list reduces to the entries that match. It searches not only the fields like content names and titles of content but also any text within the content.
Filters - If you need to further refine your search to find what you’re looking for, or to see all content of a certain type published in a specific month or by a specific person, Filters give you a range of options. Narrow your search by author, date published, date created, status, header, banner colour – the list goes on. If you want to remove a filter, place your cursor after it and hit backspace.
TIP: Let’s say you need to find a CTA assembly named ‘Donate now’, but there are 8 CTA assemblies with that exact vague name. No problem. Contentful gives every entry a unique ID. So if you have nothing else to go on but can find the entry you want where it’s used in other content, go into that entry and click its Info tab in the sidebar. There’s you’ll find its ID, which you can then use in a search using the ID filter.
Save as view - You’ll quickly find yourself doing the same searches again and again. For this, you can use Save as view to always have that search to hand in your left-hand column. Save your search in My views or Shared views, which lets you define the Contentful roles that can see it.
When any new content is created that meets the exact criteria and filters of your saved search, the list of content you’ll see for your search will update to include the new stuff.
TIP: If you delete any saved views, you’ll need to refresh your browser window to remove the view.
Organising your columns
You can change which columns appear in your dashboard’s content list and change the order (left to right) in which they appear. Click the columns cog upper right beneath Add entry.
In the window that appears, single-click a category under AVAILABLE COLUMNS to add it to DISPLAYED COLUMNS. Click-drag on a category’s six dots to change its position.
By default, the displayed columns include:
Name of the content, a permanent column. (If the content type doesn’t have a name field, it will display ‘title’)
Updated date
Author: the last person to publish the entry.
Status of each content entry: published, draft or changed. (You can also archive content entries – see the guide to deleting and archiving.) Status is also a permanent field.
The default available columns you can add include Content type, Created (date) and Published (date).
You can also use the columns cog to add columns specific to whatever content type you have the type dropdown (above the content list) set to. So if your dropdown is set to Assembly - CTA and you want to see all the colours selected for those entries, click the columns cog, find Banner colour under Available columns and click to add it to your columns.
Any questions? Email Lindsay Foley in the Central Digital team.