CrafterCMS Enterprise Delivery (Ubuntu x86_64)

What do you like best about the product?

Crafter CMS has a great support team that is very helpful during challenging times. Logging options are very flexible which helps to quickly diagnose problems. Updating content, deploying the changes across the cluster are very simple tasks. From a development & deployment perspective, Crafter is a dream.

What do you dislike about the product?

My biggest dislike is the way Crafter syncs data between repos. I suppose Git is a better than the old option of Alfresco, but Git working across clusters has been prone to conflicts which are sometimes a mess to work through. There's got to be a better way.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Crafter continues to upgrade their products to be more user-friendly. That allows me to spend less time troubleshooting Crafter servers which is very helpful.

What do you like best about the product?

I like that the delivery (website in our case) is separate from the authoring environment, which means we can deploy releases at any time without impacting the end user.

What do you dislike about the product?

The version that we currently use requires an instance of Elastic that is outside of the Crafter environment and our internal security policy makes that difficult to maintain.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We are using CrafterCMS to store and maintain content related to a public website. The information served on the site is a combination of video-on-demand, live-streaming video and articles. A consolidated platform to maintain access to this content is beneficial.

What do you like best about the product?

Crafter CMS offers several unique advantages for our company. For example,
- Content Management, Crafter CMS offers easy-to-use WYSIWYG features that allow the content author to preview desktop and mobile content before publishing.
- Content Distribution, Crafter CMS supports modern headless-cms capability, which allows the developer to build API(s) to distribute content through multi-tenant architecture.
- Content Discovery, Crafter CMS provides GraphQL out of the box, which allows the developer to build advanced queries on top of a massive pool of content.
- Content Version Control, we have complex needs to support CI/CD (Continue Integration and Deployment) for our multi-tier architecture between Content Authors and Developers. Crafter CMS offers version control, which allowed us to build automation and improves the overall code quality and time-to-market on content publishing.
- Crafter Customer Support, Good software cannot be GREAT without superb customer support. The Crafter product team went beyond our needs as a software vendor. The core team members in Crafter software company had a long innovation history in the CMS industry. They experienced different paradigm shifts and created CMS solutions for different industries. They are passionate about CMS technologies and open to working with their customer to resolve challenges.

What do you dislike about the product?

Crafter offers several advanced features with limited documentation support. It would be great to see an archive of how-to videos and examples so the Crafter community can take advantage of all the Crafter offerings.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We manage a global brand across 25 locales with 50 Million unique visitors (YTD 2020). The CMS system we used to manage and publish content cannot scale with the business grows. We need a modern CMS that provides security, scalability, and easy-to-use features so we can manage and distribute content across multiple web properties.

Crafter CMS offers several benefits from a software development perspective. Crafter CMS has built-in API support that allows the developer to integrate internally sourced content onto Crafter in an automated fashion.

Crafter CMS is AWS friendly and is extremely flexible to monitor, Lamdba functions, and integrations with other AWS features.

Crafter CMS supports version control. We have complex needs to support CI/CD (Continue Integration and Deployment) for our multi-tier architecture between Content Authors and Developers. Crafter CMS offers version control, which allowed us to build automation and improves the overall code quality and time-to-market on content publishing.

What do you like best about the product?

There are many features that I like in Crafter CMS. Some of the noteworthy ones are:-
1) Content authors and developers can work on the same version of "truth" and this enables rapid feedback from authors to devs.
2) Git based versioning allows easy branching out and merging back for new features.
3) Self contained installer bundles (tomcat, elasticsearch, webapp jars etc) provide an easy way to create prototypes.
4) REST API to configure and monitor the engine and studio services
5) JVM based architecture means backend features can be developed and debugged from IDEA (or any other capable Java IDE)

What do you dislike about the product?

There are a couple of things that I believe could be improved for an even better user experience. They are:-

1) There are far too many externalised configuration properties and they are scattered over a large number xml files. It would be great if some of these can be internalised (some sensible defaults with ability to override if necessary) and the external ones made more intuitive.
2) The documentation, though extensive, is not very user friendly. It has a "reference manual" kind-of layout which helps someone who knows crafter very well but needs more details on how to do something (for example:- they know that an issue is in the studio and also know which api to call, but needs more information regarding the payload, or request headers etc). For someone completely new to Crafter, the documentation navigation is not very conducive to an "exploratory" style of learning the product.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

The biggest benefit is the ease with which new API endpoints can be added to the site for search, categorisation, filtering etc. It also takes care of indexing and caching of content so that queries are executed quickly.

It has given us a rapid yet fully managed way of publishing content out into the world. The audit log is also super helpful in finding the responsible authors so that any issues with content can be easily rectified.

What do you like best about the product?

We love the idea of the Git-based repository. The fact that code, content and configuration is in
one place makes it very easy to synchronise dev, authoring and production systems. We can push
our features forward from dev to production and pull production content back to work with real data
on the development system. Testing features couldn’t be any easier than just switching branches.
And while we deploy new features to production authors can work without interruption.

What do you dislike about the product?

The market penetration of CrafterCMS isn't on the level it has to be.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It’s great to be able to use APIs for everything. We can in fact render markup, serve content and
even use APIs for DevOps automation and processes. It makes Crafter highly flexible and gives us
the possibility to manage, integrate and deliver content anywhere at any time. Furthermore, it gives
us the freedom to work with any front end framework on top of Crafter’s headless content server.
And finally we are pretty overwhelmed by Crafters responsive support. We use Slack to get in
touch with them but there is a growing community in Google Groups and Stack Overflow as well.