You probably have seen all the announcements of Content Hub ONE already during the Sitecore Symposium 2022, either you were in Chicago to hear it first-hand from Steve Tzikakis or you watched the live stream with us. Either way, you probably have heard about the new kid on the block, when it comes to Headless CMS. Since it was announced in October I've tried to get my hands on the product. I was lucky to meet up with Ezgi Göçücü at the Symposium. She showed me the Content Hub ONE for the first time and I couldn't be more excited to see it for the first time. I've been working with Content Hub for the last three years and am still impressed with the system each day. So to hear that Sitecore has created a new product based on the kernel of Content Hub was exciting.
Let's start with the question does Sitecore deliver on the Headless CMS experience?
Yes, Sitecore delivers a pretty slick Headless CMS experience. The interface looks good and is fast and to the point. There aren't many things you can adjust and that makes it perfect for focusing on content writing. This is combined with the CDN technology called Experience Edge and we've a globally scaled solution for writing and publishing content. And don't forget the whole solution is SaaS, so no need to worry about maintenance. Sitecore has you covered.
So how does it look?
I've included a couple of screenshots from the system. When you login into the system, this is the homepage a user sees. You notice that there are a couple of navigation items. Next to Home, we've Content types, Content, Media and Settings.
Content types
So what are content types? A content type can be seen as a blueprint of a content item. With a content type, you can specify which fields are available for the content editor/marketer. Content Hub ONE offers the following field types:
- Text
The text field comes in two types. You can make it a short text, which limits it to 256 characters, good for titles, URLs or tags. And then there is the long text option. These are good for writing paragraphs and articles. It can contain up to 50.000 characters.
- Rich text
This is the WYSIWYG editor in Content Hub ONE.
- Number
The number field can only be used for round numbers (read integers), you aren't allowed to put in a fraction. This makes the field pretty limited in my opinion. Let's hope that Sitecore improves usability on the field.
- Boolean
What is there to say about a boolean field? It can be either true or false, right? Sorry, but you're wrong. For me, as a C# developer, this feels really weird. If you look closely at the image below you might already guess the answer. In Content Hub ONE the boolean value doesn't default to a value and is therefore NULL when not set. The cool thing here, Sitecore let you Clear your selection and makes it possible to put the value back to NULL. Keep this in mind when sharing the metadata model with the implementors.
- Date/Time
It would have been better if this field was called the Date&Time field. The system forces you to choose a date and time or nothing at all. I'm glad that they punt in the time zones from the start.
- Reference
The reference field is actually a pretty cool field. It allows you to reference links to other content items. An improvement would be to limit the content types that an editor is allowed to select here. The current implementation allows you to choose any content item from any content type. This might be something you want to restrict.
- Media
Don't forget about the media field. This allows you to select items from the media library. If you're used to Content Hub, the selection feels limited. More on this later when we take a look at the media functionality.
That's it for today. Next week I will share my final thoughts for now about Content Hub ONE. So far, really dig the easiness of the system!