In March, we launched Hygraph Studio in beta. As part of the launch, we hosted five insightful sessions sharing our vision for the Future of Content and how Hygraph Studio optimizes performance and user-friendliness, improves reliability, and boosts developer efficiency.
Here’s a quick recap of our product launch sessions.
#Day 1 - Keynote: The Future of Content
Content evolves to become a product
At Hygraph, we see many instances in which content is now becoming the product itself instead of being the means to promote your products.
Examples include Netflix providing videos, Blinklist providing book reviews, Peloton selling its fitness experience, etc. Content is an essential part of these applications and drives their business.
This fundamental change in how content is perceived drives brands and businesses to build content-rich digital products rather than just information websites or marketing offerings. Hence, they expect more from a content platform or CMS.
To power content-rich applications, you need:
- A flexible content model.
- A strong permissions engine not only for the UI but also for the API.
- An API that functions similarly to how you query a database, with both read and write capabilities.
At Hygraph, we’ve designed our APIs and capabilities very closely to the usual software development stack, similar to a database and backend as a service rather than a straightforward content authoring tool for read-only use cases.
To illustrate Hygraph’s approach to content management, let’s consider two extremes: one where marketing teams need to create static landing pages with less frequent content changes — page builders shine best for this use case. The other is where you need the flexibility of a database to power content-rich applications, where content changes frequently and is delivered across platforms and channels — and Hygraph is best suited for these requirements.
How this evolution impacts the technology
In addition to the CMS capabilities, organizations must consider having an interoperable and composable architecture that allows content providers to adapt to new markets and technologies.
- Emerging technologies change how content is created or consumed; just think of AI or VR.
- Changing business needs, such as varying subscription models.
- New external data sources and more dynamic data.
Only a decoupled CMS system can adapt to these unique requirements and enable content creators, developers, and marketers to work independently and efficiently.
Organizations must also consider how they pull the content needed for their applications from different sources. This content will likely not be available in a single place.
Content Federation, offered by Hygraph, is a step in this direction.
The role of generative AI in content management
With content becoming the product, we believe large language models can add value in more complex use cases than content creation.
At Hygraph, we are working proactively to extend this in a few important directions:
- We want to make developers more productive using conversational AI to enable them to understand product documentation quickly.
- Generative AI can also help less tech-savvy developers interact with complex systems, such as creating schema or queries for a CMS.
- Using AI, we can equip brands with the tools to deliver hyper-targeted content to markets and individuals in the language, style, and tone they prefer.
#Day 2 - DevX: Performance Gains
Developer features and their impact on performance improvement
This session started with a discussion about our investment in performance to deliver on the promise of the Future of Content.
Our first significant change was the new regional deployments of the management server. The Management API is now located in the same region as your content. This translates to faster load times, improved disaster recovery, and reduced latency for management operations across all regions.
Secondly, we’ve rebuilt the user interface from the ground up to improve performance—going from a Single-Page Application (SPA) to a full-stack Server-Side Rendering (SSR) first Remix app. Improvements under the hood boost performance, security, observability, and testing.
In addition, some of the other new features for developers include:
- Command Menu to help you quickly navigate through the project.
- Enhanced Schema view.
- OAuth Support for Commercetools and CommerceLayer.
- New API playground.
These major enhancements allow developers to work more productively, iterating and building digital applications much faster.
New Hygraph Asset Management System
All new, blank projects now feature the new Hygraph Asset Management System, designed to improve performance and reliability — we’ve recorded quicker asset delivery times and reduced time to clone environments or entire projects.
On the higher end, projects with 10,000 assets that used to take 80 minutes to clone can now be cloned in under a few minutes.
In a more typical use case, if you have about 1000 assets, the project will be cloned in under a minute with the new system.
The new asset system also offers:
- A new way to upload assets.
- Regional URLs to serve assets.
- SEO-friendly URLs.
- A more comprehensive range of asset transformations
New High-performance Endpoint and Cache Invalidation
Last year, we introduced model-and-stage-based cache invalidation. With the launch of the Studio, we made things more granular — we invalidated the cache for changes to individual content entries.
As a result, it improves the cache hit ratio, reduces latency, and, most importantly, allows websites and applications to load faster for your end-users.
New Studio Documentation
With Studio, we have also built a new documentation project at studio-docs.hygraph.com
Designed to help users find the guidance they need, the new documentation is also in beta. As we progress on Hygraph Studio feature parity and updates, you will notice regular updates to the documentation, too. At various points, we also identify whether a feature is available in Studio, Classic, or both.
#Day 3 - Editor Experience, Simplified
On day three, the focus was on editor productivity.
Redesigned Content Table
The redesigned Content Table makes things less cluttered by emphasizing the title field.
The new and improved Custom Views simplify Search and Filtering, and hover cards allow editors to quickly scan the fields within content entries without opening them.
New pop-ups help editors quickly see information contained within the entries. This is particularly useful for images, and the new pop-up for image preview further helps here.
Enhanced Content Form and Field Outlines
The first thing you’ll notice is a revamped content form when you open a content entry.
The new Field Outline is displayed to the left of this content form. It shows the structure of the content entry, and clicking on an item in the outline takes you to that field in the content form.
- You’ll find only the essential elements within the Content Form; we’ve hidden some buttons and superfluous information.
- Relations are more concise, and when editing one, the unsaved data in the content entry will remain—you needn’t worry about losing it.
The Components section within the form got an upgrade — it loads faster through lazy loading. It features a search bar to help you quickly find the Component you are looking for (especially useful when dealing with multiple nested Components).
#Day 4 - Workshop: Hygraph Asset Management
This workshop featured a live coding session during which we built a stock image website using the new Hygraph Asset Management System and NuxtJS—in just 40 minutes, using the Hygraph Assets model without additional Content Models.
How did our Developer Relations team do this?
- Created a .env file to connect to Hygraph’s GraphQL API.
- Wrote a query to fetch all assets and related data from Hygraph.
- Performed transformations in the query.
- Used various fields from the queried data and showed them on the page in NuxtJS.
You can access the resources needed for this here:
#Day 5 - Panel: Peak Performance
Our final panel session involved a deep dive into the nerdy details of the key decisions while building the new Hygraph Studio and their impact on application performance.
The engineers spoke about:
- Why we chose Remix and how it helped us move from a SPA to a full-stack SSR-first app.
- How we reduced complexity on the front end and our bundle size.
- Our reasons for choosing the Go language for this project.
They wrapped up with a demo of the new caching strategy, showcasing how a change to a content entry only invalidates the cache for that entry.