Metalsmith and Contenful Sync - content-management-system

I have been using the metalsmith contenful plugin. I am wondering if maybe I have the idea of static site generators wring, but what is the purpose of this if I have to run a build every time something is changed on contentful.
Is there a way to have metalsmith on my server and have a build issued anytime contenful is changed, or is this a bad idea.
What would be recommended for keeping a site in sync with contentful more than just accessing the database with a static site generator.

If you want to automatically keep in sync a static site built using content on Contentful your best option is to use webhooks.
Contentful provides webhooks which can be used for different types of events (publish, editions, etc.).

Related

Dynamically Change API Environments Google Rollout Track

I'm developing an Ionic(3 / 4)(Angular 4 - 7)-Cordova / Capacitor Cross Platform Application(s). I'm interested in switching API env based on the current rollout track in the Google Play Store. For example, once an application has been successfully tested and recommended to continue staging/production. I would like to have the API env dynamically changed (e.g., using a different URI domain to connect to REST API ) dependent on the Google Play Store Track.
I'm aware that I can use Google Developer Play Store API to identify / list versions and available tracks yet, I'm unaware if there's already an implementation or solution. I'm perfectly willing to design a solution though, I figure I find out if it's been done already rather than reinvent the wheel.
I'm hoping to implement a solution either to the REST API BACKEND or in the ionic framework layer rather than an integration at the native layer for scalability per-project. The purpose of doing this would enable CI rather than rebuilding the project and change the API URI domain for every environment. Any assistance in this matter would be greatly appreciated.
So, if anyone's interested. The approach highlighted above is possible, couldn't get an answer so I just created something. Using Google Play Developer API. The process flow is as follows:
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For now it's a working prototype perhaps its not very efficient; I suppose it can be improved if the request was issued from a single server, or microservice. Though, I wanted to make the code recyclable and it's isolated from both the mobile application & Node Server.
If you are interested in learning more or would like to work on project. Please feel free to contact me.

How to get around rate limits of publicly available APIs

So I am trying to build my first full website, and my idea for this website involves using a publicly available API. The only issue is that most public APIs have a rate limit of a certain amount of requests per hour, and if I am making direct requests from my application to their API, I will probably run out of requests if I have any users whatsoever.
My question is, is there a way to design the website in a way that could not have the outside dependency? What I was thinking was using this public API to build my own API service that my website uses with only the information I need. The only issue I see with this is that the public API is constantly changing, so I will constantly have to run scripts to update my own API with the correct data and would have to redeploy. Is there any clean way of accomplishing this from a design perspective? Thanks

A/B Test a Page Step in a Single Page without a new URL

I am trying to figure out how to run an A/B Test for a change on a Page Step for a Single Page. The idea is we have a payment flow with several page steps each containing a form. We'd like to swap out forms and test how our users react. We are trying to avoid changing the URL.
I looked into tools such as Google Analytics, but that requires a different URL to run the A/B test. The hesitation about creating a new URL is because our users are known to bookmark them, and we don't want to keep a backlog of redirects from invalid URLs, also we'd like to avoid constantly deploying new URLs for our tests.
I cannot seem to find any tool to do this, so I've tried to think of a few solutions but I'm not having a lot of luck.
My best idea is to build both a and b forms into the page, and when a user accesses the flow, the session randomly(based on a preset%) stores a value that dictates whether the user is in test a or b. Then when they step into that form, the server will serve the proper form to them. If they abandon their session, we'd track that, and if they complete the action, we'd track that.
I feel like there should be a better solution, but I just cannot come up with one.
My results online were either blogs showing how to approach it from a high level, and all of them used different URLs, I have found almost no developer resources.
Thanks.
We're using ExtJS 4.2.2, and .NET as our server.
Whenever you need the server to be involved, you need server-side instrumentation. No free tools offer that, but you could consider Optimizely "full-stack" (has support for C#) or Variant (does not yet).

How do I sync an offline web app (HTML+JS+CSS) with my server?

Do I need to implement my own sync methods in order to make an offline web app (html+css+js) stay up to date with changes made on the server (and viceversa)? I'm using MySQL on the server side.
I read Two-way sync between iPhone application and web application with some pointers but I think they're talking about native applications when they mention CFUUIDCreate and I wander if this is possible for the Web.
Does someone have some code to share or maybe can point me in the right direction?
Thank you!
P.S.: I hope my english is not that rusty ;)
To store static contents on the client-side, as Jethro Larson said, the Application Cache Manifest is the way to go to cache the static contents of your website (HTML, CSS, JS and images).
To handle dynamically generated contents offline, you can use javascript templates. There are several solutions for this.
To sync the two databases, there is a project called persistence.js (persistencejs.org) which is a javascript library which offers a unique API to work with WebSQL databases, Local Storage, etc. They have a plugin for this library called persistence.sync (persistencejs.org/plugin/sync) which syncs the remote database with the server's one. It consists of POST and GET requests to a specific url that you can configure (for example yourapp.dev/sync). They have an example back-end written in node.js and here is one for Rails. It's simple to understand and persistence.sync is well documented.
Look at the offline cache:
http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/html/HTML5-Application-Caching/
http://www.google.com/search?q=offline+cache+html5
http://www.slideshare.net/search/slideshow?q=offline+cache

How to stage deployment of an app on same server as production?

I've just inherited a CF app from a customer who uses a shared CF hosting provider. I'd like to introduce better processes including the ability to stage app changes that I make for their review. (In the past, they would upload changes and cross their fingers.)
Their app lives in a folder under the webroot. Let's call it "/app". I'd like to create a sibling directory named "/appstaging" where I would publish the latest code. The obstacle is that the hosting provider lets you set paths for custom tags and mappings but not per CF app. The existing settings all point into the /app directory so if I need to make changes to tags, CFCs, etc., I can't test these without affecting the live app. What I want is CF to let me set per-app tag paths and mappings. From what I've read, CF8 lets me do this but the customer is using CF7 (I'm pushing for them to upgrade asap). In the meantime, is there anyway to workaround this or does a smooth way of staging changes have to wait?
(I am currently experimenting with ways to detect which app I am based on using GetCurrentTemplatePath() in application.cfm. The idea is that any code that refers to other files using mappings would use a different mapping. I haven't done enough work there though to know if this will all work out.)
Any ideas or input are welcome. I should point out that the app and its dev env is not very "modern." There are no frameworks involved and no things like ant used for build/deployment. The customer's budget is extremely limited so I'm not looking to convert the app whole-sale but I do need to find cheap ways to get some process in there to keep things sane.
This is a serious, but wacky, suggestion: use a second hosted account.
Write up a cost-benefit analysis of having live and staging servers, and compare that to the cost of a second hosted account. The second account doesn't need massive data allowances, etc, and ought not cost as much as the live account.
Additionally, calcuate the cost of revising the code base to allow live and staging on the one account and compare that to the cost of a second hosting account.
Remember that you wont need the second account once your real upgrade is complete.
I expect you'll need to do something like defining the custom tag paths in a config file that gets loaded into the application scope. But that'll require some serious code refitting.