The Flexibility of Flamelink, a headless CMS for Firebase.

Written by jasonmsaidwhat | Published 2017/12/08
Tech Story Tags: web-development | firebase | flamelink | headless-cms | developer-tools

TLDRvia the TL;DR App

Hi There,

Thanks for taking the time to read a little more about Flamelink, an easy-to-use, content-centric CMS built to seamlessly integrate with Google’s Firebase.

If you’re new to the party, allow me to give you a quick overview of Flamelink:

If you’ve used Firebase to build a mobile application or web project before, you’ll know that Firebase is fast and pretty powerful. Firebase has a more robust infrastructure than a number of other developer tools and also possesses a technically superior data structure and API delivery. And with all of the features continually being added, it’s becoming a really versatile tool in a Developer’s arsenal.

Our team LOVES Firebase!

What’s missing, in our opinion, is a helpful user interface to add and manage content. As it stands, Content Managers need to request content changes from Developers of the project, to simply swap out an image, or change a single line of text.

This causes unnecessary interruptions and distractions. Flamelink solves this by effortlessly integrating with Firebase to give Developers and Content Managers a headless CMS to add, manage, and update content on the fly.

If you’ve got 90 seconds to burn, you can check out Flamelink’s Explainer Video:

I’ve also written about Flamelink before. You can read it, here.

So This Flexibility You Speak Of…

Yes! Flamelink Flexibility!

With Flamelink, our team wanted to build a fairly robust solution to help make the lives of Developers (and Content Managers) really easy. We believe that the Flexibility we’ve given Flamelink is going to achieve that in 3 ways.

  1. Frontend Flexibility.
  2. Flexible Content Types
  3. Flexible Users

1) Frontend Flexibility

Everyone has their favourites. React, Angular, Vue to name but a few. While I’m pretty sure we could start a conversation that would go on forever about which Frontend Framework is the best, we may never reach a universal consensus. And that’s ok. At the end of the day, you should be able to work within a framework or language that you’re comfortable with. That’s why Flamelink’s headless solution handles content — no more, no less, and offers Developers the Flexibility to use any Frontend.

2) Flexible Content Types

With current CMS’s, you’re kind of limited to the content types that come out the box. Eventually, it hits the straps and you need to come up with a new plan of action — which usually requires more time, and more budget. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Flamelink offers a slick drag and drop content builder to create your own content types. This also allows you to quickly put together a simple to use form for content editors and in turn create the API endpoint for the developer.

Within Flamelink’s slick User Interface, users can add, update and delete the content types created under the schema section.

They can upload any type of file to their Firebase storage bucket and organise them in their creative folders and can easily create and structure menus for web or mobile Apps, all within the navigation area.

Flamelink’s Drag-and-Drop Content Builder

Flamelink’s Schema Builder

3) User Management

Here’s the thing. Content Managers shouldn’t need to get their fingers dirty in the code base, and Developers shouldn’t need to stop writing smoking hot code

The user section integrates with the authentication service from Firebase. This means that users created in Flamelink will automatically be created in Firebase. Users can be assigned multiple permission groups created in the permissions section for each custom content type and built in feature.

Please note, that while Flamelink is currently free to use, at some point in the future, we’ll be charging for certain features. This includes increase in the number of users. You can find out more at https://flamelink.io/pricing

Bonus Sneak Peek of Upcoming Flamelink Flexibility!

We’re excited that in future, we’ll be able to give users even more Flexibility in future releases and features. From Multi-Language Support so that you can use multiple languages for your projects, to Multi-Environments so that you can create staging and production environments to test out any changes before pushing them to the live site/App.

TRY FLAMELINK FOR FREE

Flamelink recently launched a beta version and we’ve had some really great feedback from the initial users. If you’re keen to jump right in and get started, visit flamelink.io

If you think Flamelink is something other Firebase users could benefit from, feel free to tell them about it. You can also stay up to date with the latest exciting Flamelink developments, by signing up for our newsletter.

We’d love to hear from you on social media.

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Written by jasonmsaidwhat | Marketing Lead at Flamelink.io, the Firebase CMS
Published by HackerNoon on 2017/12/08