How to get around the "use only 10 entries" limit in Contentful

[stichbury]

Probably one for @tynandebold:

I'm creating a blog post with a number of code snippets in it. For each snippet, I make a separate entry using the "Embed" dropdown (and select "Entry" rather than "Inline entry" since I've found these cause the post to fail to load).

However, once I've added 10, I hit a limit.

I'm only half way through uploading the post so I don't think I can easily resolve this (in the past I've worked around by squeezing a couple of snippets together). Is there a way you can think of that I can get around it, other than paying for the next tier of membership, if that's what the reason for the limit is?

[stichbury]

I've been rummaging around the pricing model https://www.contentful.com/pricing/ but haven't yet found where it mentions this limit in particular.

[tynandebold]

It might be on this page, where it says References, entry descendants?

[stichbury]

Thanks! I see the basic plan doesn't have any limits on these at all (at least, there are no numbers given).

I also wonder about the difference between "References, many field" and "References, entry descendants" but I guess that really isn't helping much.

I'm not sure what to do TBH since this blocks creating a post. I can try and publish it elsewhere or just give up, since there's no way I can revise the post to reduce to less than 10 blocks. I've tried making gists to embed without using the "entry" feature but that doesn't work, making screengrab "assets" won't either since they'll count as entries, I assume, so I'm out of ideas.

[tynandebold]

Can you add more than 10 Inline entry entries?

We could create a support issue with them as well.

[stichbury]

The inline entries don't work -- the page doesn't render. Let me put together an example and I'll share a link...

[rashidakanchwala]

@stichbury , @tynandebold -- Should I close this issue for now since there is no plan for a paid plan now. Or is there another resolution to this?

[rashidakanchwala]

Closing this for now.

[astrojuanlu]

There is no plan to pay for Contentful but this is a limitation for technical blog posts. If I understand correctly, engineering never took this ticket so it's not clear whether other solutions exist, right?

One possible solution is to move away from Contentful and shop for alternatives, for example Storyblok is another headless CMS https://www.storyblok.com

Another more disrupting possibility is to have different infrastructure for the blog, so that blog posts can be authored in Markdown. That would be a cool possibility actually, and make review much easier - our current workflow relies on having a Notion doc or a GH PR, have the reviews there, and then copy-paste the content, which is plain terrible.

Maybe the conclusion is that "this is all too complex and it's not worth it", but I think at a minimum we should explore what the options are.

[tynandebold]

Another more disrupting possibility is to have different infrastructure for the blog, so that blog posts can be authored in Markdown.

That is probably the most worthwhile thing to do. It's likely that even if we move to another headless CMS, we'll still have limitations at some point in the future.

If we do want to do this work, Markdown seems the most flexible, customizable, and therefore the most worthy thing to aim for.

[stichbury]

our current workflow relies on having a Notion doc or a GH PR, have the reviews there, and then copy-paste the content, which is plain terrible.

I think it depends on your perspective TBH. As a content creator, I'd rather have review feedback in notion, google docs or word than in markdown comments, because threading doesn't work as well for discussion. I've always worked like this when it comes to content because blog posts != documentation.

However, this is for you to prioritise and decide, so will leave it with you.

[astrojuanlu]

The way I see this, GitHub reviews are similar to Notion comments or Google Docs comments - they are all collaborative side notes.

Also, the fact that the authoring happens in Markdown doesn't prevent us from using the other systems in any way. The copy-paste step happens in a different way, but for folks that are more comfortable with those tools, nothing would change IMHO.

[astrojuanlu]

https://hashnode.com/

Headless mode, rich editor, developer friendly (sync with GitHub!), and more. Worth a look.