Integrations overview
A headless CMS is one of the cornerstones of a digital experience stack as it contains all content. Still, it's often just a part of a bigger system. An advantage of using a headless CMS is that you aren't locked into using services from one vendor only. Thanks to Kentico Kontent's API-first design, you can integrate most services to form the desired digital experience stack.
For example, you can have your preferred asset management tool, e-commerce solution, search and recommendation engine, caching layer, or translation memory system. Connect all these services to run your business efficiently.
Do you have any questions about integrating with Kontent? Ask away.
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Integration points
Kontent offers a couple of key integration points to address the most common integration scenarios.
Delivery API
The Delivery API is the primary way of serving the published content through your application. It can also be used as a data source for any integration that works with your published content.
It's designed to handle large amounts of traffic, so if you need to read and process a large amount of data at once, the Delivery API is the way to go.
Management API
To automate your content management, use the Management API. It allows you, for example, to retrieve content that is being worked on in real-time, update any content, or create new content items, language variants, or content types.
It comes in handy in different situations, for example:
- Content import while importing and transforming content from a different data source into Kontent
- Localization for creating new language variants of content items after various translation tools outputs the localized content
Webhooks
Another way to integrate with Kontent is through webhooks. Webhooks are notifications about content that an external service can observe and act accordingly. They are mostly used for automation since the notifications are sent once a predefined condition is met, such as when a content item is published.
There are many different scenarios for webhooks, for example:
- Content synchronization with a 3rd-party system, such as sending new content for translation or caching layer
- Notifications through different channels, such as the content published or removed notifications on Slack or updating a JIRA ticket with your progress
Since webhooks can be tied to any of your workflow steps, these two features together can be very powerful and offer a large number of integration possibilities.
Custom elements
Custom elements allow you to extend the Kontent app (a user interface integration). Technically, they're configurable custom web applications displayed during content item editing. In Kontent, you add them to your content model, so they're always specific for each content item. They also have their own value that is retrievable through the mentioned APIs.
The common scenarios for custom elements are, for example:
- Asset management systems so that content creators can browse visually through its asset library or link external assets to their content
- E-commerce platforms that allow store managers to go through the product catalog while creating complementary content about the selected product
Custom elements enable content creators to do actions in another platform from the Kontent app directly.
You can either create your own custom elements or use our gallery of custom elements to get inspired. The custom elements in the gallery are reusable, free, and open source.