A short history of content management with Magento

We all enjoy familiarity, so when it comes to building function into an eCommerce site running Magento, the temptation as a developer is always to build it right into Magento. This has been a common trend in Magento, with Gene developing BlueFoot in the early days of Magento 2, which Adobe eventually acquired, which is now known as “Page Builder”, an ‘out-of-the-box’ solution for merchants.

Page Builder was a great start, with the expectation that it would continue to improve with future versions of Magento. Unfortunately, this never came to fruition, leading to disappointment from the community and a lacklustre experience for those now using it.

Other systems for content management ensued, but by trying to build interfaces that covered every use case, these interfaces became unwieldy and prone to human error, making it impossible for junior staff to adequately manage content.

As Google started penalising slow sites, developers put more efforts into making sites faster and quickly found an issue; with content management systems loading numerous libraries for any possible admin action, the extra weight added to pages from classic CMS systems became a clear culprit for slow sites.

At Wind & Kite, we could see this solution worked for no one; our developers spent many frustrating hours trying to give Page Builder the basic features we needed, including our Open Source performance improvements last year, and administrators struggled to use it. Something had to give.

Introducing Storyblok

After researching numerous systems, we had a clear winner: Storyblok.

Storyblok is a headless CMS, in simple terms, Storyblok is an incredibly user-friendly database. Administrators fill in simple, easy to use forms. This data is passed directly to the website, and in real-time, we can see the results.

The advantages of this are huge. Administrators aren’t bogged down with a complex interface with millions of buttons. Instead, they only see the exact fields they need. Developers can build beautiful templates without worrying about ‘what happens if they press this button?’. The result is a faster development cycle and improved administrator experience.

Take our work, it’s Open Source

While some early attempts at Magento-Storyblok integrations existed, many were built on deprecated API clients or proved cumbersome to develop and extend, so Wind & Kite spent considerable efforts to build a complete integration with Storyblok’s system. We launched this with the Lewmar website to huge success. After further improvements, we’re now proud to give this back to the community, completely free.

You can find our module and detailed documentation (including quick start guides, configuration, and developer guides in the Wiki) just here: https://github.com/windandkite/storyblok

We’ll be actively maintaining this module for the whole community. We can’t wait to see what others can build with Storyblok and Magento, and we’ll be talking more about some of our other projects using Storyblok soon!

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