Educators Going Global

Background

Educators Going Global is a blog and podcast created by a teacher with decades of experience teaching at international schools around the world. Her mission is to introduce new teachers to the international teaching lifestyle, get them started on their global journey, and provide guidance and resources along the way.

She started producing podcast episodes featuring guests from the many schools and organizations she has worked with over the years. As the podcast grew, she worked on a companion blog site with additional resources for podcast listeners. She found it quite difficult to create the site she wanted with traditional blogging tools.

Kyle recommended a Headless CMS architecture for her site that would allow her to focus entirely on producing podcast episodes and blog posts while eliminating any need for her to work on the logic or styling of her site.

Visit Educators Going Global

Challenges

Separation of Concerns

1. The content creator must be able to focus entirely on producing new content and not need to do any work on the underlying site.
2. Updates to the codebase should not be able to impact any content directly.

Support for Multiple Content Types

1. Podcast episodes, videos, blog posts, and external resources must all be displayable in cards and on their own post pages.
2. Any embeddable content should be playable directly on the site.

Frequent Content Updates

1. The content creator must be able to upload new podcast episodes and blog posts on their own schedule and have those updates deploy to the live site.
2. No code changes or git pipeline jobs should be necessary to trigger a new deployment to the live site. At the same time, it should be easy to redeploy the site when updates are made to the codebase.

Choice of Tech Stack

Performance

1. Next.js provides static site generation (SSG) which massively improves loading speeds on pages with heavy content loads. SSG fetches content from the CMS API at build time so that the client doesn't need to make a separate network request for the resources during page load.
2. React Virtuoso allows infinite scroll for up to thousands of pieces of content as the blog and podcast continue to expand, only rendering the nearest 10 in the DOM at one time.

Scalability

1. Contentful is a Headless CMS that can seamlesly integrate with Next.js SSG functionality to feed content from the cloud to the site at build time. The content author has full control over their content library and can continue to expand it indefinitely.
2. Next.js dynamic routes allow individual pages to be created for every piece of content that needs its own path. When the content author uploads a new blog post or podcast episode to the Contentful CMS, they don't need to create a page on the site where that content will live - a dedicated route will automatically be generated for it when the site redeploys.

Deployment

1. Netlify provides cloud computing, site hosting, and deployment management which integrates seamlessly with Headless CMS architecture. An integration with Git allows CI/CD when pull requests merge, and build hooks can trigger deployments based on custom parameters - in this case, whenever the content author publishes an update on the Contentful CMS.