After a busy end of the year, it’s an ideal time for a refresher on some great quality of life improvements that Kontent.ai customers can now enjoy—and there’s a lot of them! We’ve continued to evolve the platform to pump up your content operations in 2023 and beyond.
Let’s take a look at 2022’s release highlights and break them down into seven stages of the content journey, from creation to publishing. The next time your teams kick off a new global project, they’ll get a head start with these new features in the Kontent.ai modular content platform!
1. Create content more intuitively
Kontent.ai has always been dedicated to providing an excellent authoring experience. When creators start working on fresh content in 2023, they’ve now got some new options to speed up their workflow.
- Drag and drop files into the rich text editor in Kontent.ai to compose content more quickly and easily. Images are uploaded as assets and added into the content directly, while other files are uploaded as assets and added as links.
- Nest headings up to six levels deep in the rich text editor, Management API, and SDKs, perfect for content that requires lots of formatting and paragraphs. We’ve added support for two more levels of headings, H5 and H6, to help improve the clarity of your texts.
- Create superscripts and subscripts with keyboard shortcuts, by pressing (CTRL + Shift + ,) or (CTRL + Shift + .) respectively, when writing about, for example, how much CO2 is in a m3 of air or natural gas. Kontent.ai’s rich text editor shortcuts improve the authoring experience (and not only when writing about environmental issues).
2. Save time and improve consistency
When default values and options to limit content item link types were released, they made an impact by improving repeatable work, reducing the room for error, and saving time for content creators. Now default values can make an even bigger impact with the ability to use them across almost all types of elements.
- Set default values for all types of elements, except for rich text. Repeated information, like the source of an image or copyright for an asset, can be prefilled and set as a default value. You can also easily see which elements contain default values, as these are marked with a label saying whether the default value is used. Content managers can set the default values in the user interface, while developers can get everything set up using the Management API.
- Limit the types of content item links to improve consistency and prevent broken links. You can also quickly pre-select all content types with URL slug elements. This will save time for content creators who’ll be able to choose only from items that can be linked.
3. Keep assets secure and sorted
Creating content and keeping it consistent is just part of the content journey. Making sure content is organized and secure also deserves attention. Let’s explore the improvements delivered to the platform’s asset management capabilities in 2022 and how they help teams work with content more effectively.
- Sort and find assets quickly: It’s now easier than ever to find the right assets for your content, as you can sort them by title, creation date, and file size in the asset library. Kontent.ai remembers the sorting option you selected and will sort assets the same way next time. And when you insert images into a content item, the system remembers the last visited folder in the asset library, to help you focus on working with content, not searching the assets.
- Give asset links more credibility with custom domains: Kontent.ai allows you to use your own domain to serve assets to your website visitors. Don’t hesitate to set up your custom asset domain to provide better SEO for your site and make your asset URLs more trustworthy.
- Secure access to your project’s assets: If you work with sensitive content or projects that are not public facing and need to be hidden behind sign-in walls, you can protect your content and assets with secure access. This way, only your applications can fetch those assets, which is great for maintaining intranets and private knowledge bases in Kontent.ai.
4. Navigate through projects easily
Collections come in handy when you want to group related content and users, and they’re getting better all the time! But as the number of Collections a project uses grows, it’s important to keep the workspace easily navigable for your teams and make sure they find what they’re looking for. Our releases delivered in 2022 do just that.
- Keep your Collections well-organized: Collections are a great tool to keep your content and projects organized, while storing everything in one place. Organizations with a large number of Collections can now easily search through them in Project settings. Project managers can add even more clarity and visibility into your content operations by naming Collections with more descriptive titles, as the names can now contain up to 200 characters.
- Work with components better, faster, at scale: A content item can have multiple components, which is an essential part of content modeling. If you have 15 or more components in a content item, they no longer expand automatically after you open the item, saving you time. To get an idea of what’s inside the component, you can have a look at their text preview and scan through collapsed components quickly. And to top if off, you can now filter out all content items with components of a chosen type when listing content types.
5. Work smart with global content and remote teams
Working with remote teams and collaborating on global localized content can be challenging, especially when you need to be aware of different time zones. It’s no easy feat to manage employees and customers who are scattered all around the world, so this next set of updates was built with those challenges in mind.
- Schedule publishing and display global content: With the time zone selector, you can now schedule an item to publish or unpublish at an exact time in a particular time zone. Moreover, when preparing a landing page for an event or webinar, you can use the date and time element to display the time in the local time zone. Let’s say you need to schedule content for 6pm in Tokyo while you’re in London, or show that your event takes place on January 18, 5pm EST in New York—Kontent.ai takes care of it!
- Show active users in project settings: It’s important to have a clear overview of active users in your subscription, whether your teammates are all around the globe, or sitting next to you in the office. User listings in projects show active users by default. If necessary, you can apply filters to see deactivated users as well. This makes user management much clearer, as only active users factor into the user quota in a subscription.
- Ensure consistency across all languages: Organizations reaching local markets need to localize their content. However, some content needs to remain not localized—for example, a brand name, codes, and IDs—even when you work with content translated into several languages. In Kontent.ai, you can achieve this with non-localizable elements, which remain the same in all language variants. This applies to all types of elements, except for rich text.
6. Bring more visibility to content governance
Complex organizations with tons of content need to have a clear overview and transparency over how all content is governed. In Kontent.ai, teams can set up multiple workflows to keep project operations under control and ensure consistency. Let’s see how you can keep everyone on the same page!
- Know your workflows well: To give managers more insights into content operations, it’s now easy to find information about the workflow of your content items in content item’s revision list and an item’s detail in the editorial calendar. Moreover, you can see how many content items fall under each specific workflow.
- Manage multiple workflows via API: Developers can use the Management API to manage workflows, which allows them to programmatically create, update, and delete custom workflows. And with our updated management SDKs, you can manage workflows in your scripts. For example, when you hire a new project manager and add them to AD, they can automatically be assigned to appropriate roles in Kontent.ai.
7. Automate and scale project operations
Our last batch of updates from 2022 is all about simplifying the way teams can work with large amounts of content. Organizations with large-scale operations will surely appreciate the possibility to automate more of their content and project management processes.
- Handle operations and teams at scale: With the Subscription API, you can now easily synchronize users and their permissions across projects under your subscription, perform batch operations, and integrate Kontent.ai with your preferred identity provider. See the release notes on streamlined user management for more details on how administrators can manage large teams of users, saving them lots of manual work.
- Manage environments quickly and easily: Developers can use the Management API endpoints to clone, rename, delete, and mark environments as production. The API endpoints for environment management let you automate the creation of new environments and backups.
- Synchronize content refresh with Sync API: For smoother refresh processes, you can now use Sync API to synchronize changes made to your content items. The API lets you know if your content changed in Delivery API or Delivery Preview API. Compared to webhooks, this approach offers better performance for complex projects and enables filtering of the synchronised content by type, language, and collection. Sync API is available through an early access program. Let us know via Intercom if you’d like to try!
Setting you up for success in 2023
While looking back at some of the features released in 2022, we remain committed to delivering the best value for your projects in the upcoming year. You can look forward to new exciting product enhancements, so stay tuned and keep an eye on the Product changelog for more updates and improvements coming your way!
Business users, feel free to check out our e-learning courses to get up to speed with headless CMS, or visit the resource center to download some useful materials. Developers can always dive into our comprehensive API reference.
