Introducing Hierarchies: Easily manage content trees

Today, we’re introducing Hierarchies, a better way to manage and model nested content through our content management API and Dynamic Content UI. Hierarchies allow you to manage content more efficiently and unlocks better ways to handle content tree based use cases.

Our team analysed a variety of typical management workflows and tasks and we identified that content producers often waste a lot of time navigating content that’s nested below other pieces of content. Clicking through multiple levels of content to check and make updates for your website, app, and other channels… Without having any context as to where you are within the content structure. You’ve got a lot to do and deadlines to hit! The content structure and UI is getting in the way of you delivering. This navigation process is time consuming, preventing you and your team from focusing on what really matters to you and your customers.

This is where Hierarchies come in - it allows you to visualize and manage all your nested content into hierarchical trees. Providing a holistic view so you can easily view, reallocate and edit nested content in less clicks, saving you time and reducing headaches! You can now simply browse and select what you want to change and implement it immediately.

Do more, in less time, with Hierarchies.

Hierarchies for marketers

Hierarchies let you see the whole context (see above example). It might be a page or website layout, a buyer’s guide or a list of tags to apply to blog posts. The user interface makes it easy to see all of the tree, and decide where to add and remove nodes if they need to.

To get started with hierarchies you’ll need a hand from your development team - all the information they need can be found in the Hierarchies documentation!

Hierarchies for developers

In Dynamic Content, a hierarchy provides a new way to link content items together. The content items in a hierarchy are normal content items that have relationships to each other. The main difference is that a content item that is part of a hierarchy will have a relationship with its parent.

With our new filter API you can traverse your content graph faster and more efficiently via the use of these parent IDs.

To enable you and your business users to benefit from hierarchies you will first need to assign the content types the hierarchies trait and specify the valid child content types. Once this is complete, marketing teams can then make use of the hierarchies UI to manage nested content.

To get started with hierarchies and updates to our filter API you can find further details and examples in our Hierarchies documentation.

Structured trees beyond websites

Data stored in a headless CMS has no assumptions around the presentation layer – making the data more flexible and reusable. However, this greater flexibility presents a challenge as to how you represent and manage relational content as you are no longer bound to page-centric content models and trees.

Hierarchies enable you to not only model page-centric structures and product catalogs but also to model concepts that are important to your business and how your team manages and operates. Be it a page structure for a website, a list of worldwide store locations organised by country and city, a structured list of product content, app settings or a list of ingredients and meal types for a recipe site.

Hierarchies lend themselves to many use cases.