Use Contentful as a Content Source

This article shows how to establish a connection between SearchUnify and your Contentful CMS platform. Through the connection, SearchUnify can index data stored in your Contentful spaces and environments and make it searchable.

Establish a Connection

1. Navigate to Content Sources.

   

2. Click Add New Content Source.

   

3. Find Contentful and click Add.

   

4. Enter the details and click Connect.

   • Name: A descriptive label that will be used to identify your content source. Useful when you have several content sources in an instance.

   • Language. Select the language your data is in. More than 20 languages are supported.

   • Space ID. Enter the ID of the space to be indexed. Check out Get Contentful Space ID and API Key.

   • Access Token. Enter the Content Delivery API access token corresponding to the space ID.

   

Set Up Crawl Frequency

The first crawl is always manual and is performed after configuring the content source. In Choose A Date, select a date to start crawling; the data created after the selected date will be crawled. For now, keep the frequency to its default value Never and click Set and move to the next section.

Select Content Types for Indexing

After setting the connection and configuring frequency, define content models for indexing. You can find a list of all content models on the Content model page. In the image, you can see two content models: Article and Author.

1. In Rules, enter a content model in Object Api and give it a name Search Label. If the name of the Content model is correct, click Add Object. To add more than one Content models, repeat the process.

2. Click to specify the fields in a Content model that should be indexed. A new screen appears where you can configure the fields. Once you are done, click Apply. Repeat the process for all the fields.

   

After the First Crawl

Return to the Content Sources screen and click in Actions. The number of indexed documents is updated after the crawl is complete. You can view crawl progress in in Actions. Documentation on crawl progress is in View Crawl Logs.

NOTE 1

Review the settings in Rules if there is no progress in Crawl Logs.

NOTE 2

For Mamba '22 and newer instances, search isn't impacted during a crawl. However, in older instances, some documents remain inaccessible while a crawl is going on.

Once the first crawl is complete, click in Actions open the content source for editing, and set a crawl frequency.

1. In Choose a Date, click to fire up a calendar and select a date. Only the data after the selected date is indexed.

   

2. Use the Frequency dropdown to select how often SearchUnify should index the data. For illustration, the frequency has been set to Weekly and Tuesday has been chosen as the crawling day. Whenever the Frequency is other than Never, a third dropdown appears where you can specify the interval. Also, whenever Frequency is set to Hourly, then manual crawls are disabled.

   

3. Click Set to save crawl frequency settings. On clicking Set, you are taken to the Rules tab.