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A Federated GraphQL API for Content

Authors
  • avatar
    Name
    David Rhodes
    Twitter
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hygraph: A Powerful and Easy-to-Use Headless CMS Solution

As I compose this blog post in my .mdx file, I'm really getting tired of hard-coding markdown for my app's content. Do you also wish there was an easier way to update published content on the fly? Then you may want to check out hygraph as a headless CMS solution for your app. As an engineer who has used hygraph on two projects, I can recommend it as a powerful and easy-to-use platform that allows frontend engineers to drop any content into the code using a simple and declarative query syntax. Even better, it allows content maintenance to be done by non-technical team members, which makes it a great choice for teams of all sizes.

Ease of Use for Teams

One of the breakthroughs 🙌 of using hygraph is that it makes it easy for your team to manage and update content and go live quickly. For example, let's say you're working on a project with a product manager who wants to update the copy or images on your website. Instead of having to hard code the new copy into the website, your product manager can simply log in to hygraph and make the changes directly in the Content pane. The changes will then be reflected on the website without any additional coding required.

Federated Data Sources

Another great benefit of using hygraph -- it allows you to federate multiple data sources into a single GraphQL API. This makes it easy to pull in data from multiple APIs whether REST or GraphQL, such as Airtable, Contentful, or Shopify, and query them all using a single API. And because hygraph is built on top of GraphQL, you can use the powerful query language to retrieve exactly the data you need, making it easy to drop in data points as props. Also, to complete the seamless workflow, you can build webhooks or Zapier zaps that rebuild your app on Vercel or Netlify whenever new content is posted, making deploys automatic and the published content near to real-time.

Example Apps Built with hygraph

Using one Hygraph app (freemium tier), I can set up multiple Schemas depending on my use case. And it's headless so I can consume the content from more than one app.

🎸 NashMusic - A local music blog built with Next.js, hygraph, YouTube API, and Netlify (GitHub repo)

💼 Pre Sales Jobs - A job board built with Next.js, hygraph, AirTable API, and Netlify (GitHub repo)

Version Control and Collaboration

In addition to the ease of use, hygraph also offers powerful tools for version control. You can easily revert to previous versions of your content, and you can assign permissions to team members so that only authorized users can make changes to your content.

Conclusion

Overall, I definitely recommend hygraph as a headless CMS solution for any engineer looking to streamline their content management process. So my next project will be converting the espressocode.tech blog into a hygraph project for faster workflow. It's powerful, easy-to-use, and offers robust collaboration features that make it a great choice for teams of all sizes. So, give it a try and see how it can improve your content management process.