SnapshotAnchor
Startups.com is the world's largest startup platform. It helps over one million startup companies find customers, funding, mentors, and world-class education. The Ohio-based platform consists of six products: Startups.com, Clarity, Fundable, Launchrock, Bizplan, and Zirtual.
GraphCMS powers significant portions of the periodic content across Startups’ digital properties: news articles, interviews with founders, investors and expert advice. The team of Startups.com uses schema stitching to connect the GraphCMS API with the API of its own internal GraphQL server.
The ProcessAnchor
The Startups.com team wanted to bring data from several systems together to a single, data-rich content hub where their frontend team could easily query the data. This was possible with GraphCMS via schema stitching. Schema stitching is the process of creating a single GraphQL schema from multiple underlying GraphQL APIs. It enables developers to query all of the data as part of one single schema, and get everything they need in one request.
Startups.com wanted to move away from using a handful of content management systems – several interconnected Wordpress instances – to a single platform. It was important that the chosen system offered high powered GraphQL APIs and could easily work with modern frameworks, like React.
Why GraphCMS?Anchor
The Startups.com team chose GraphCMS for the following reasons.
Powerful GraphQL APIs with Schema StitchingAnchor
The Startups.com team benefited from the ease that GraphCMS allows teams to programmatically bring together content from several systems using GraphCMS Schema Stitching. The powerful GraphQL APIs that GraphCMS offers allows teams to work quickly, while maintaining a high degree of accuracy due to the type-safe nature of GraphQL.
Improved Workflows to Expedite Content CreationAnchor
It was important to reevaluate the workflows from both a Developer and Content team perspective. GraphCMS offered the familiarity of Content Editing tools, like the Rich Text Editor, to the Content Team and simplified their workflow by bringing all of the data into a single system. The Development team worked more efficiently and since all of the data was in one place, could perform more checks on the accuracy of the data, something that previously was more challenging with several open-source instances.
Results and BenefitsAnchor
- Single source of truth of content meant that content remained well organized and easy to use within the systems.
- Powerful GraphQL APIs and schema stitching expedited the development process
- Type-safe nature of GraphCMS helped improve the accuracy of the code.
- GraphCMS acts as a system of “guard rails”. It warns programmers whenever they do a change that violates a previous constraint they have set themselves. This safety net allows Startups.com to develop and move quickly.