Development

This section is for developers who want to find out more about how to integrate a website, app or e-commerce system with Dynamic Content.

In this section we've included information to help you implement each step of a typical project, from creating your content types to consuming published content.

The following explains the main parts of this section in more detail.

Content type schemas

This section takes developers through what will typically be their first step in a project: creating content type schemas. These will usually be based on designs and wireframes from the creative team. Content type schema development involves creating a JSON schema that describes the content, breaking it down into its component parts: such as text, images and video elements and applying business rules, such as field validation. In the content type schema section we go through the structure of schemas in detail, including examples of each property type and validation and provide some complete examples. We also show how to use the new schema editor to quickly create schemas.

Working with content types

This section shows you how to register a content type with a hub and update and refresh a content type that's already been registered. We also cover configuring icons, cards and visualizations.

In order to make it easier for content producers to work with content created from your content types, you should configure a card, either using one of our built-in cards or by creating a custom card. A card provides a representation of a content item in the content library, making a content item easier to find.

Visualizations provide a preview of content in the content editing window, allowing content producers to make sure they're happy with content before it's scheduled to be published.

This section provides complete examples of developing both custom cards and visualizations.

Both cards and visualizations are written in a similar way and involve writing code to retrieving the content from the CMS and developing rendering code, such as handlebars and CSS. Much of the same code will be used for consuming published content.

Slots

In Dynamic Content content items are contained within slots. This section walks you through the creation of a slot type, creating a slot, adding it to an edition and scheduling some content to be published into that slot. It also shows how to find the slot id for a slot item, this is then used to consume the content in that slot.

Consuming content

In the consuming content section, we explain how to retrieve individual content items, and slots from the CMS. As you will see, both slots and content items have a unique ID that is used to retrieve their content in JSON format. The only difference is that a slot is a container for one or more content items.

In this section we walk through the example of consuming content that is published to a slot and provide some example rendering code, including a handlebars template. Much of this rendering code will be the same for each content type, whether you're developing a card preview or visualization or consuming that content as part of a slot.

Content preview apps

A content preview app lets you display of the contents of one or more slots at any point in the future. The content preview can range from a single slot to an entire website or app and allows content planners to see exactly what their selected channel will look like at the specified time. Consuming content within a content preview app is very similar to consuming published content in a slot, but there are some differences to allow you to view scheduled, but unpublished, content at the specified date and time. This page includes a simple, but complete example.