UI extensions - Use cases

UI Extensions are mainly used for the following two use cases:

• Customizing and enhancing the user experience of the Contentful web app.
• Integrating with third party systems to decorate structured content with meta data.

Enhancing Authoring Experience

In cases wherein the field types provided by Contentful do not meet the specific requirements of the authors or editors, UI Extensions can be created to customize the Contentful web app suite to fit the authors' needs perfectly. Consider the following scenarios:

• Requirement to add a multi-line text editor to a text field.
• A number field that allows the author to store geo-coordinates.
• To make tabular data editable.
• Displaying the difference between draft and published states of a field.
• To validate that all the links in the content are working.
• An enhanced interface that provides authors a quicker solution for setting references.

For all the above mentioned scenarios and many more UI Extensions are the perfect solution.

Third Party Integrations

UI Extensions can be created to communicate with external APIs and integrate third-party data in Contentful. Consider the following scenarios:

• Extracting the video ID from a valid YouTube URL.
• Translating text from the default locale to other locales in a space using an external translating API.
• Fetching product details from an external e-commerce website and embed it with content in Contentful.

The possibilities are endless!