Conference focuses on the explosive growth of content-driven digital apps, products and services as businesses make the shift to becoming digital-first

Contentful, the leading content platform for digital-first businesses, is set to host the 2021 Fast Forward virtual conference amid a year of accelerated investment in digital. The company anticipates an eventful conference to hear first-hand from the company’s partners and customers, including Staples, GitHub, Wayfair among others in sharing best practices in building content-driven digital experiences.

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In the past year, the company has expanded its platform to enable digital teams to speed up the development of digital apps, products and services by providing them with the tools to easily build and deliver content-driven experiences. The company has also released new features such as app hosting and sharing, which facilitate the sharing and updating of apps outside of Contentful’s marketplace. Partners will now have the option to easily distribute their apps through the marketplace or monetize their IP of custom apps through new sharing options. The combination of the Contentful platform and ecosystem of partners and marketplace solutions accelerate building and adoption of a composable technology stack to meet the specific needs for ecommerce or a wide range of use cases.

“Contentful is at the center of enabling world-class digital experiences with their content platform,” said Brian Lloyd, Chief Strategist, Platforms at Apply Digital.  “Our partnership with Contentful, as a leader in this space, has allowed us to create immense value for our customers by reducing time to market, introducing scale and flexibility while driving innovation across the organization.”

Contentful’s ecosystem of technology partners and marketplace apps has continued to grow along with customer adoption. In the past year, Contentful tripled the growth of customers using a marketplace app. In July, Contentful secured an additional $175 million in Series F funding to expand its investment in building out its content platform, ecosystem and next generation of products.

“We are very proud of the accomplishments Contentful customers and partners have achieved over the past year,” said Steve Sloan, CEO of Contentful. “The momentum Contentful has experienced has allowed us to invest more in our technology to support our growing customer and partner base. More customers than ever are using the Contentful platform to push the boundaries of what is possible with digital experiences and we are excited to showcase a handful of them at this year’s Fast Forward.”

Contentful has a new set of features designed to empower developers, content creators, orchestrators and platform strategists to improve their work efficiency.

For developers, Contentful’s powerful API endpoints and webhooks give new options to build apps and manage content workflows programmatically. Scheduling content, creating releases and deploying bulk actions give developers the tools and ease to manage content at scale. It’s now also possible to build workflow automations to improve organizational visibility by sharing tasks and comments to Slack or Teams, using webhooks for tasks.

Content creators and orchestrators will have the ability to add tables directly into a rich text field in both Compose and the Contentful web app without compromising accessibility or mixing content with code. This gives creators even more flexibility to present information however they wish, using a standard UI to create tables or copy and paste them directly from Google Docs or Microsoft Word. Additionally, Contentful has released the Tasks app, built using Contentful’s own App Framework. This app allows users to assign tasks and due dates to teams as well as individuals, making it easier for organizations to collaborate on content at scale.

Finally, platform strategists have new tools to manage images and content governance. With AVIF format support, page load time and SEO performance is improved without changing content workflows utilizing the images API to deliver high quality images with smaller file sizes. Strategists can also take more control over who can access content as their organization scales without sacrificing speed or agility by implementing tag-based permissions and embargoed assets in their spaces.

All of these features are either already available to Contentful customers today or will become available in the coming weeks.

This year’s Fast Forward virtual conference will take place virtually on Wednesday, November 3rd through the 5th.  More details on the event below:

Some of the Industry Leaders Speaking at Fast Forward:

• Steve Sloan, CEO of Contentful
• Scott Hanselman, Partner Program Manager at Microsoft
• Dron Sharma, Senior Product Manager at Staples
• Rizel Scarlett, Developer Advocate at GitHub
• Megan Nixon, Content Strategy Lead of Global Content Operations and Governance at Wayfair
• Shawn Mandel, Senior Vice President at Rogers Communications

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