Contentful

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Build the content platform I actually need instead of Contentful — and be honest about which of its features you use.

**Localisation is the one that is genuinely hard.** Every field in every type existing in several languages, with fallbacks, partial translation and a way to see what is missing. If you publish in one language, most of this product's weight is not for you and the price reflects features you do not touch.

STACK
- Node 20+ with Fastify, server-rendered HTML
- SQLite through better-sqlite3, WAL mode
- Caddy in front, with a delivery network for the published API

THE DATA MODEL
- types and fields defined in files, versioned with the code that renders them
- documents in real tables per type, altered by generated migrations
- **field_values keyed by locale** if you localise: document_id, field_key, locale, value. That shape is the decision, and retrofitting it later is a migration nobody enjoys
- drafts separate from published, revisions append-only, references as real foreign keys

LOCALISATION, IF YOU NEED IT
- A default locale, and a fallback chain per locale so a missing translation shows the parent language rather than an empty page
- **A completeness view**: which documents are missing which languages, per type. That screen is what a translation team actually works from
- Publishing per locale, so English can ship while German is still being written
- Never machine-translate and publish silently. Mark it as machine-translated in the data, and let a person clear the flag

SCHEMA CHANGES WITH CONTENT IN PLACE
- This is the operational difficulty and the thing to design for. Adding a field is easy; renaming, splitting or making one required when a thousand documents exist is not
- Every change is a migration file with a **dry run that reports which documents would fail** before anything is written
- Backwards-compatible in both directions across a deploy: add the field, deploy, backfill in batches, then require it. Never in one step

ROLES AND WORKFLOW
- Roles per type and per locale — a translator may edit German and not English, and may not publish
- A workflow with as few states as your organisation actually uses. Draft, in review, published covers most of them, and every extra state is one somebody has to move things through
- Checked in the query, default deny

THE API
- Published content public, cached hard with an ETag, behind a delivery network
- Draft content behind a token
- Webhooks on publish, signed and retried
- **A row cap and a statement timeout on everything**, because a content API is a public endpoint over your database

WHAT MATTERS MOST
The locale-keyed value shape, decided before there is content, and a migration dry run. Both are invisible on day one and painful to add on day four hundred.