What is extensibility? Why you should choose extensible tools

Extensibility is a key concept for modern web development as well as a feature that enhances the functionality and longevity of any digital product. It's something we like to talk about a lot at Contentful, as the inherent flexibility of our platform delivers a huge amount of value to our users. 

This article explains extensibility in detail, including what it is, why it's important, and how you can benefit from choosing extensible development tools and platforms.

What is extensibility? Extensibility definition

Extensibility is the ability of a software product’s functionality to be extended without having to modify the product itself. Usually when you think of customizing something, you think of pulling it apart and changing something about it — something that is impractical for complex tools or impossible for SaaS platforms that you don't fully own. Extensibility means not having to worry about this, because the product itself is designed to have external components added to it to expand what it can do.

An example of the power of extensibility is your smartphone: It comes with a set of standard apps like email and a web browser (and the now-secondary ability to make calls) right out of the box. You can then choose what other things you need your phone to do and extend its functionality with additional apps that provide mapping, social media, video production, AI interaction, and practically any other function.

Why is extensibility important?

When choosing the technologies that will act as the foundation of an evolving software or multimedia product, extensibility is becoming increasingly important. Companies rely on SaaS products to reduce their development burdens, but this is often at the cost of being locked into a certain feature set that only changes when the vendor decides there is enough existing customer demand or industry inertia. This can inhibit the company’s ability to scale and jeopardize its future growth.

Adopting extensibility as a tenet of your development toolchain preemptively mitigates this, as you will always have the option of integrating new platforms or expanding your tools with your own functionality — without having to tear up your existing infrastructure and retrain your teams. 

Extensibility vs. flexibility

Extensibility makes tools highly flexible and able to integrate with other tools or fill new niches. However, a flexible tool is not necessarily extensible: For example, the spreadsheet is an incredibly versatile tool that is used in just about every industry for millions of unique use cases, but spreadsheet software itself (the most popular being Excel and Google Sheets) has historically been limited in its ability to integrate with other software, making it difficult to interact with live spreadsheet data from outside of the application. Flexibility lets a tool adapt to your needs, while extensibility ensures it can grow and connect with other tools as those needs evolve.

Extensibility vs. reusability

Extensible software also increases efficiency through reusability. By building on extensible platforms, different teams can add their own functionality without duplicating shared functionality. Duplication of effort can be further avoided by linking multiple different software products that can perform different tasks across an organization, extending and complementing each other by sharing centralized information like user accounts, customer data, or cross-channel content.

Types of extensibility 

There are extensible platforms and components that can be connected that cover just about every project requirement, including processing online payments, communicating with customers, creating and curating content, and even generating audio and video. These platforms provide different degrees of extensibility, from pre-defined integrations for non-technical users to full access to a software application's source code. 

Plugins, extensions, and modules

Software can be designed to be extended through a native integration system that provides a streamlined interface for connecting to another data source or product. For example, web browser plugins can be installed with a single click, integrating your web browser with new search engines, ad blocking services, or social networks.

Code extensibility and APIs

The code behind any software is extensible by nature. If you have access to the source code for a project, you can extend it at any time, in any way. However, this comes at the cost of tinkering with (what should be) stable and thoroughly tested software and, in the case of wanting to allow others to integrate your software, giving them broad access to your code and systems. 

APIs allow you to securely interact with software through a standardized programmatic interface, allowing for software to be extended without changing it (and accidentally introducing a bug). REST and GraphQL APIs are provided by many online platforms so that you can read and write data to them and access their functionality programmatically from other applications.

Extensibility and composability

Composability, the ability to assemble complex functionality from different components, goes hand in hand with extensibility. Rather than developing your own solution to every problem, you can take an assortment of extensible software products and connect them together to create your own internal tools and customer-facing products. This greatly reduces the necessary development resources and infrastructure overheads required to deliver a project.

What to look for when choosing extensible tools

Contentful leads the way in extensibility in app development, content creation, and delivery with composable content. In addition to our market-leading composable content platform, we also have an extensive ecosystem of partners, apps, and integrations you won’t find anywhere else. 

We strive to ensure our platform meets best practices for extensibility to act as a model for what a truly extensible product should look like:

1. We put you in control of your tech stack: You define the tooling and work environment to support your teams the way they work — even in diverse organizations with teams that don’t all work the same way. As that environment shifts, you have the power to adapt your tech stack.

2. Our platform is constantly evolving to be more extensible and meet new requirements: We are constantly improving the Contentful platform by consulting our users and identifying key emerging technologies that will benefit them. By continuing to expand and enhance our platform with new features, we save you from having to build out those functionalities or worry about maintainability, freeing developer time for more valuable priorities.

When choosing the tools and processes that enable your teams to create, manage, and deploy content, there are several important considerations that should be made:

• Extensibility, flexibility, and reusability should be a priority, not an afterthought.

• Platforms should allow for the seamless integration of other applications or services, and the freedom to work with APIs and frameworks of your choosing.

• Look for products with a growing catalog of ready-made applications, plugins, modules, and integrations.

• A supportive community will allow you to gather skills and insight from passionate and knowledgeable developers and architects.

These requirements should extend to any tool you plan to integrate into your key business processes so that they can adapt to and evolve with your way of doing things, rather than you having to adopt sub-optimal processes to fit with rigid and inflexible tools. 

Building extensible apps on an extensible platform 

The Contentful® Composable Content Platform stands out by giving you the extensible tools you need to make the most of a composable architecture in your applications. 

Build your app by integrating the tools you already use

One of the pillars of the Contentful ecosystem is the App Framework, which allows developers to create bespoke experiences using our platform. Agencies that build with Contentful can create fully customized applications that extend their existing toolchains, allowing for efficient content creation and curation. 

In addition to this ability to independently build apps, the Contentful Marketplace contains apps built by our partners and community members that integrate with your composable content platform. This includes integrations with best-in-class tools for AI content generation, video creation, ecommerce, file storage, databases, analytics, knowledge bases, and pretty much anything else you need (or already use). Fresh apps offering new functionality are regularly added, ensuring solutions built with Contentful are always on the leading edge. 

Rather than hand-coding your own extensible platform from scratch, Contentful lets you compose it visually on top of our technology platform, greatly reducing the time it takes to build, test, and deploy applications while keeping you in control of your toolchain.

Extensibility with Contentful in action

The Contentful development team regularly assists our customers and helps them develop their applications — we like being helpful, and we also like to use our own product to make sure it's meeting our users’ needs (and to see what we can do better!). An example is the Merge app.

Merge provides a visual interface for identifying and resolving the differences between multiple Contentful environments’ content models. It was built specifically for our user-developers to resolve the pain point of manually cross-checking different environments for inconsistencies. 

The Contentful Merge app demonstrating the extensibility of composable content platforms.

This highlights one of the greatest benefits of extensibility: When a problem is identified or a new requirement emerges, your existing tools can be extended to address it. This means that developers can move quickly and aren't limited by a platform's predefined functionality, which especially benefits smaller businesses who may not be big enough to influence the development path of the platforms they rely on to have their specific needs addressed.

Check out this testimonial from DocuSign, for example:

“The Merge app really reduced our need to write our own migration scripts. This saved our team a significant amount of time and reduced the potential for errors that might have occurred. It’s great to see Contentful investing in tools that support the dev teams and give us a more robust set of capabilities, and we’re looking forward to seeing more capabilities that allow us to scale our Contentful instance faster to satisfy our business stakeholders.” – Karel Caste, DocuSign

The new functionality being added by the Contentful community using the App Framework continues to impress both our own developers and our users. In order to continue to facilitate the extensibility of our platform, we're constantly iterating on what's next for the App Framework. Over the past year, we’ve released a slew of updates that enhance user experience, including: 

• App actions, which allow individual apps to link up together and power complex workflows.

• Cross-environment support, which opens the doors for building apps that tie multiple Contentful spaces together.

• Customizable home screens for individual spaces, which users see when they first log in. This feature update allows that initial experience to be tailored to what’s most important to the user, to get started for the first time, and streamline their daily routine.

Extensibility also means accessibility: Every business has a unique audience and cannot be limited in reaching them by the tools they use. The fourth version (v4) of our open-source design system, Forma 36, brings Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) level AAA compliance to our extensible React component library (except for our color palette, which is optimized for level WCAG AA). Meeting this standard means that your teams can build on the Contentful® Composable Content Platform with customized branding and functionality without skimping on accessibility. 

Extensibility and composability is only possible with a great community

There will always be a requirement to readily adapt content and processes and extend tooling at will. A composable content platform allows you to build and reconfigure experiences with interchangeable components so that content can flex and evolve to match an ever-changing market. Composability is what facilitates this extensibility, making it easier to adjust on the fly and stay ahead of changing user expectations and industry requirements.

Businesses that don't have their own in-house development team (or lone rockstar developer) can leverage the concepts of extensibility and composability by choosing a Contentful partner to augment their organization and assist them in building the ideal app for their use case. This means that in the face of shifting business needs, you can focus on your business while your Contentful partner navigates the shifting landscape of development technology, infrastructure, and user-facing experiences for you. This makes sure your digital brand is always at the forefront. 

Even with the many options in our ecosystem, you might not always find what you want. We built the App Framework with this understanding so that you or your Contentful partner can always leverage extensibility to achieve your exact project requirements.

TMWX did just this, using the App Framework to solve a business-critical problem for dealerships selling BMW and MINI cars in the United Kingdom. They built a custom app that helps the BMW and MINI teams incorporate official marketing content into locally managed websites for dealerships. TMWX utilized Contentful's extensibility features to automate the setup and configuration of these websites so that each dealership wouldn't need its own web developers to ensure localized content was accurate and up to date. 

This delivery model allowed TMWX to roll out 160 websites for BMW and an additional 140 sites for MINI, with the latter going live in just five weeks. The platform’s custom editing experience enables non-technical editors to create fresh and compelling content as needed for the individual dealerships. Overall, TMWX’s work to replatform BMW and MINI to Contentful has led to increasing test drive bookings, financial quotes, and enquiries to dealerships, providing a measurable and significant ROI for investing in an extensible toolchain.

Extensible ecosystems for building extensible apps

So, in a practical sense, what is extensibility? Beyond basic definitions, extensibility is defined by its outcomes: By building with extensible tools and integrating extensible platforms, you can ensure that your software stacks are fully configurable and ready to adapt and grow as new technologies, product categories, and ways of communicating evolve.

The Contentful approach to composable content serves as a prime example of how extensibility should be done. Taking advantage of everything that comprises our ecosystem — the App Framework, our network of partners, our marketplace, and of course, our fully configurable platform and APIs — means fully realizing the power of extensibility.

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