What’s new with Watson Content Hub in Q2 2018
In the last 3 months, WCH has evolved at the same hectic pace as in the 3 months before that. The product is really maturing into a highly capable content management system and this quarter’s new features enhance your ability to customise the product to meet your needs.
Here’s a list of what we shipped in the second quarter, with a description of a couple of the key features below that.
- Landing Pages
- Shutterstock image purchase
- Enable remote preview for React SPA
- Custom element
- Custom authoring UI extensions (Graduated from Beta)
- React SPA template
- HTML Embed Code component
- Script Applications
- Site template enhancements & Simplified template update
- Command line tool enhancements
Click on the banner or this link to take the free 30 day trial to see for yourself.
I value your comments and feedback – you can reach me by email david.strachan@uk.ibm.com, Twitter @circularlizard, or on LinkedIn.
Landing pages
Landing pages are single web pages that can be used as promotional marketing campaigns. These are simple pages disconnected from the main site navigation, usually without header or footer, that can be used for example as the destination for links sent in emails.
Landing pages need a content type mapped to layout templates similar to the website pages. As a developer you can configure the templates to be used as landing page types, pages types, or as both. Landing page templates can be created only from content types that do not have any content associated with it. This tutorial shows how to configure a content type to be a landing page type.
Shutterstock Image Purchase
Shutterstock’s library of millions of professional quality images, video clips, and music tracks, are now available through IBM Watson Content Hub. Marketers are now able to quickly discover the optimal visual to drive increased revenues through a greater level of overall engagement.
Custom Element
Custom Element allows you to create reusable components in your content model. Unlike references, custom elements can be added to a content type like any other element.
A perfect example would be an address, which has a standardised format. You could build content types field by field, each time having to add all of the rules to validate a correctly formatted address. That’s clearly pretty time-consuming and over time will no doubt lead to variation in how addresses are represented in your system. With custom element, you define a new element type “Address” and add that everywhere you need an address. If you update the source type, that will be updated everywhere the custom element is used.
Another benefit is that, unlike references, the custom element is returned in the same API call as the rest of the content item. That reduces the number of API calls you have to make to retrieve content, potentially improving your site performance.