Product Roundup: Q1 2023

TL;DRAnchor

• New apps for commercetools, Crowdin, and AltText.ai.
• Extend Hygraph capabilities and connect to external systems by building apps using our new App Framework.
• For improved performance and low-latency, we now offer model-and-stage-based Partial Cache Invalidations.
• You can now assign comments on content entries using the new Assignment Workflow.
• You can now reply and start a discussion under any comment.
• Sneak peek: we will be introducing significant improvements to content federation in the next quarter.

New featuresAnchor

New App FrameworkAnchor

We understand that every team is unique, each with its own requirements and workflows.

Keeping this in mind, we introduced our new App Framework, which allows you to build custom apps and customize the platform according to your unique needs.

You can add functionalities to Hygraph, connect to external systems, automate workflows and do much more.

Apps can be used to:

• Add custom fields to models.
• Customize the sidebar.
• Create custom page views.
• Fetch data from third-party systems
• Trigger actions in other systems

The benefitsAnchor

• Customize your project to the needs of your business, create custom integrations and extend the out-of-the-box capabilities.
• Make it easier for editors and business users to work with connected content across different systems.

Ready to build apps? Get started by following the steps in our detailed documentation.

Or read more on examples, or watch the recording of our detailed webinar on the framework.

Partial Cache InvalidationAnchor

Hygraph caches every content query using a globally distributed CDN, for optimal query performance. When you make changes to your content, instead of invalidating the entire cache, you can now set up Hygraph to invalidate only the model or stage at which the content changes were made.

The model-and-stage-based Partial Cache Invalidation is now available on the new high-performance read-only endpoint.

This means that any changes made to a model will only invalidate the content cached for that model. The content for other models (if not requested in the same query) will not be invalidated.

For example, changes made to a content entry of the model "product description" will only invalidate entries cached for the "product description" model and not others; "price", "assets", etc. However, if another model, such as "price" is referenced within the "product description" and requested within the same query, only then the content for the "price" model will be invalidated.

Similarly, any changes made to content on the "draft" stage, will not invalidate the cache for content on the "published" stage.

The benefitsAnchor

• Higher cache hit ratio: Since the entire cache is not invalidated, content is more often served from the cache than the origin. This makes downstream applications/websites load faster.
• Lower latency: The high-performance read-only endpoint offers low latency, and the new partial cache invalidation further improves this.
• Improved User Satisfaction: Websites/applications load faster for your end-users, which leads to improved engagement and user satisfaction.

Note: Partial Cache Invalidation is only offered on the new high-performance read-only endpoint. To learn more about configuring endpoints and caching, visit our documentation.

Improvements to CommentingAnchor

To help teams collaborate effectively on content, we rolled out significant improvements to our recently launched Commenting feature.

These include the new Assignment Workflow and the ability to start a discussion under any comment.

Users can now assign a comment to another user.

The assignee will get a notification regarding the comment that has been assigned to them. Once this has been catered to, the assignee can then resolve the comment.

For improved visibility, users can see who a comment has been assigned to, and the ones that have been resolved.

Users can also now easily reply to any comment and start a discussion.

The benefitsAnchor

• The new Assignment Workflow helps editorial teams publish content much faster, as relevant stakeholders can be quickly informed about their tasks.
• The ability to start a discussion under any comment reduces clutter and makes it easier to resolve comments.

New applicationsAnchor

commercetoolsAnchor

commercetools is one of the world's leading commerce solutions built on modern MACH principles.

You can now bring your products from commercetools into Hygraph projects along with the rest of your content. No need to add product IDs manually. Simple!

With this integration, you can continue to use commercetools as your preferred headless commerce system and Hygraph for managing content. Information can be referenced across the two systems using product IDs.

You can also combine it with our remote sources feature, and use the unique product ID to fetch other related data from commercetools (such as price).

This helps simplify API requests. Rather than making separate API requests, you can fetch all product information from just Hygraph's API.

Check out the commercetools integration on our marketplace →

CrowdinAnchor

Crowdin is a cloud-based localization software for teams and businesses, which allows you to automate the translation of all your content.

Our new app allows you to sync content between Crowdin and Hygraph. Rather than manually adding content, you can view content from Hygraph in Crowdin and submit it for translation.

You can either selectively choose content entries to translate.

Or you can set up automatic translation, where the app checks for any new content (based on the time duration you specify) and automatically submits it for translation.

Lastly, the sidebar in Hygraph displays the progress of each translation right next to each content entry.

Check out the Crowdin integration on our marketplace →

AI Alt Text generatorAnchor

For SEO and accessibility purposes, it's important to add an alt text to your images. However, manually adding alt text can be cumbersome and time-consuming.

Here's where our new AI Alt Text Generator, integrated with alttext.ai can help.

It's a simple app that adds an alt text field to the asset model and a sidebar button to generate alt text.

The app uses AI from AltText.ai to process the contents of the image and automatically adds the relevant alt text to the asset.

Check out the AI alt text generator on our marketplace →

Sneak peekAnchor

Top-level FederationAnchor

To help organizations streamline sourcing of content from external systems, we will be introducing significant improvements to our content federation capabilities.

Our current content federation capabilities allow you to enrich content from a remote API on a field level. This means that you need to have both a content entry in Hygraph and a unique identifier present (such as ID), which is passed as an input argument to fetch related data from the remote API.

We plan to streamline the process further by introducing Top-level Federation. This will allow you to directly fetch content from remote systems using one single Hygraph API, without the need to have corresponding content entries in Hygraph.

Explanation using an e-commerce exampleAnchor

Consider querying product information (e.g., price, product type, etc.) from your commerce system (e.g. Shopify) through the Hygraph API.

query {
  ShopifyProduct (id: "108548309") {
    title
    description
    totalInventory
    onlineStoreUrl
  }
}

Today, you would need to store Shopify product IDs in content entries in Hygraph, and then use this as an input argument to fetch other product information.

With the new Top-level Federation capabilities, you can directly query for product information from Shopify using the Hygraph API, without the need to store any content in Hygraph.

Improvements to WebhooksAnchor

We will be introducing significant improvements to Webhooks, which include the ability to extend the payloads and use endpoint parameters, as well as a UI redesign and a new Webhook replay button.

With extended Webhook payloads, data from resources (e.g., assets or relational models) can be included within the Webhook payloads. This eliminates the need to write proxy scripts to retrieve this data from the API instead.

Other improvementsAnchor

We plan to further enhance the user experience when working with large content entries (with a large number of fields) in Hygraph.

Moreover, we will be working on numerous improvements that will help optimize the performance of digital products you build using Hygraph.

Community SpotlightAnchor

We conducted a webinar on our recently launched App Framework, with an overview of what it is, followed by a discussion with our customers and partners who built apps using the framework, and a demonstration of building a QR code app using Hygraph.

We have an upcoming webinar on April 26th at 4pm CET on the topic “Have you reached the tipping point to consider an ecommerce replatform?”

The webinar will feature Markus Lorenz, eCommerce Consultant at datrycs, Filippo Conforti, Co-founder & CEO of Commerce Layer and Gijs Hendrix, VP of Product at Hygraph.

We also released a few examples of what you can build using Hygraph, so do check them out and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Join our communityAnchor

​​Want to know when features roll out in real time to test, provide feedback and direction for Hygraph? Join our community through slack to stay up-to-date on all Hygraph announcements, events, and all the growing ways to get involved with Hygraph and our team.

Join our Community Slack →