What Is the Structured Text Field and How Does It Work?
Cantiere Creativo has always had a passion for headless CMSs, so much so that we incubated one that has become a world-class product, DatoCMS, used by more than 25,000 companies around the globe.
There are many reasons why we're so fond of these platforms. In the past we've talked about the advantages of headless CMSs over monolithic solutions from a developer's point of view, and working on information architecture with a decoupled CMS also leads to a significant boost in efficiency when modeling content. But what we appreciate most is how they make producing the actual content more enjoyable, flexible and powerful than traditional CMSs do. To see what we mean, just look at DatoCMS's latest major feature, the "Structured Text" field you can add to your projects. The new field offers:
- a new productivity-focused editor similar to Notion that lets you write content without ever taking your hands off the keyboard, using slash commands, shortcuts and Markdown, plus drag & drop;
- the ability to create hyperlinks to other records in the project and to mix text with custom blocks, such as image galleries, videos, embeds or CTAs;
- the advantage of storing content in a safe, semantic and readable JSON format, represented as a tree of well-defined nodes.
With Structured Text, editors can write rich-text content in a flexible, powerful editor that supports their work and avoids the usual distractions of many CMSs. The video probably shows what the field can do better than words ever could:
How do I use Structured Text in my project?
The DatoCMS team has put together fairly comprehensive documentation on the Structured Text field that goes into detail and also gives a high-level overview of the concepts, plus dedicated sections in the integration guides for Next.js, Gatsby, React and Vue. That said, it's easier to see how things work through an example explained by someone who has already experimented with it extensively. That's why tomorrow, March 10 at 6:00 PM Italian time, Cantiere Creativo's CTO Joe Yates will lead a webinar in English hosted by DatoCMS explaining how to use Structured Text in a Next.js project.
You can find more information at this link. If you're curious, in the meantime you can watch our first video on the topic, where Joe shows clear examples of what you can do with Structured Text on a static site without much effort.
