Using Agility & Working with External Content


In content management, the data you work with doesn't have to exist in isolation. You may need to connect your content to external data using unique identifiers or import the entire record into Agility to edit and moderate it. Let's explore two great strategies for working with external content: Linking and Syncing.
External Linking
In some cases, you may want to embed or relate external data within your content platform.
For instance, you may have a product defined in a commerce platform like Shopify or BigCommerce that already has a ton of metadata and media associated with it. While you want to take advantage of that in your front end, you may also want to give your content team the ability to market and promote those products within your Content Platform.
That's where external linking comes in handy. External linking allows you to connect your content to external data within your content platform. This way, your content team can easily create and publish content while leveraging your commerce platform's product metadata and media.
Syncing Data
Sometimes, the external data you need is not readily available in your content platform. It may exist in an external system or database. In such cases, you may need to selectively moderate or edit the data before it can be used within your content workflow.
This often occurs when a new Content Platform is adopted, but existing business processes produce unmoderated content in a database. In such cases, you can sync the data into Agility, where your team can make edits, perform approvals, and eventually decide to publish the content to your front-end.
Agility offers multiple strategies for working with external content. External linking is great for connecting your content to external data within your content platform while syncing data provides you with an efficient way to moderate and edit external data before publishing it to your front-end. By leveraging these strategies, you can create and publish content more efficiently while taking advantage of external data to enhance your user experience.

About the Author
Joel is CTO at Agility. His first job, though, is as a father to 2 amazing humans.
Joining Agility in 2005, he has over 20 years of experience in software development and product management. He embraced cloud technology as a groundbreaking concept over a decade ago, and he continues to help customers adopt new technology with hybrid frameworks and the Jamstack. He holds a degree from The University of Guelph in English and Computer Science. He's led Agility CMS to many awards and accolades during his tenure such as being named the Best Cloud CMS by CMS Critic, as a leader on G2.com for Headless CMS, and a leader in Customer Experience on Gartner Peer Insights.
As CTO, Joel oversees the Product team, as well as working closely with the Growth and Customer Success teams. When he's not kicking butt with Agility, Joel coaches high-school football and directs musical theatre. Learn more about Joel HERE.