Introducing VIP API Mesh: A New Way to Enable Composable Digital Experiences

Start building the digital world you’ve always imagined

Building a great digital experience isn’t easy. No one size fits all. The promise of cookie-cutter Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) from a single vendor has proven fatally misguided. To succeed today, organizations must compose a digital experience from multiple systems and tools.

That’s easier said than done. 

Integrating one backend can be challenging enough, but integrating multiple can quickly overwhelm a development team. As projects designed to increase innovation and agility grow more complex, the exact opposite happens. Inconsistent APIs, ensuring performance across systems, and growing complexity all lead to messy and hard to maintain homegrown middleware.

We’ve seen this movie before. 

Every complex business application requires some form of integration layer, whether that’s ETL for data on the backend, SOA for business applications, or iPaaS for cloud integration. To solve the challenges of composable applications, we need a GraphQL middleware layer to rescue teams from the burden of maintaining their own integration solution—freeing them to move quicker, build faster, and stay ahead of the market and competition.

Enter the VIP API Mesh Powered by TakeShape

Today we’re introducing a new part of the WordPress VIP platform: the VIP API Mesh, which simplifies the integration of your backend systems. 

It handles the complex connections between WordPress VIP and other platforms, allowing front-end developers to retrieve all necessary data with a single GraphQL call. This streamlined approach reduces complexity, improves efficiency, and enhances the overall performance of your application.

Key benefits of the API Mesh

The API Mesh simplifies data integration with a single API, improves performance with caching, supports data transformation, and is accessible to both technical and non-technical users.

• Single API: Regardless where data needs to come from, the API Mesh manages pulling from various backends in a clean and consistent way.
  
• Performance acceleration: With built-in caching and indexing, queries go faster, improving your user experience and Core Web Vitals. The API Mesh also takes care of error handling and retry logic to recover from unexpected issues.
  
• Data composition and transformation: Enables data transformation per your schema across multiple systems.
  
• Prebuilt connectors, GraphQL, and REST: The API Mesh comes with dozens of prebuilt connectors for common applications. However, even for companies that may have legacy systems that don’t support GraphQL the API Mesh can support pulling data.
  
• Read/write/execute: Unlike alternatives, the API Mesh isn’t limited to pulling data from a backend. Just as easily update backend data across systems or invoke actions like triggering a marketing automation workflow on the backend.
  
• No-code/low-code tools for content practitioners: The VIP API Mesh integrates seamlessly with the WordPress Block Editor (Gutenberg), allowing non-technical staff to quickly and easily incorporate data from any API connected to the API Mesh into their content, without requiring  backend integration knowledge.

Common use cases for the API Mesh

Imagine a world where your digital experiences are seamlessly composed from a multitude of backend systems, enabling unparalleled flexibility and innovation. A world where overhead and costs are significantly reduced, while user experience and performance are elevated to new heights. 

This is the world made possible by the VIP API Mesh.

As we’ve worked with customers, we’ve noted many use cases where the API Mesh could help. Yes, no two customers are the same, but these are choice examples of how the API Mesh can solve real-world challenges.

Building a commerce experience from the ground up

A relatively new direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand wanted to create an integrated commerce experience. Starting from scratch, they needed to select not just a CMS, but also a commerce provider, solutions for customer service, loyalty management, and billing, plus two marketing automation solutions, one for an email channel and another for SMS. 

Some used pre-built connectors, others GraphQL, and others REST. Using the API Mesh, they delivered a top-notch commerce experience while accelerating development and ensuring maintainability—even as they rapidly evolved and experimented with new solutions.

Building atop of years of technology investments

Not all organizations have the luxury (or burden) of building from the ground up. 

Established brands have years of investments and domain-specific applications to integrate. In the second example below, on top of the CMS and commerce platforms, a brand leveraged Product Information Management (PIM) outside their commerce system. They also had a part fitment application from another provider that fed in data about which components were needed in which cases. 

Challengingly, this application typically returned data quite slowly (often measured in seconds) and returned it in XML format. Even with these limitations, the API Mesh’s caching and data transformation capabilities made it possible to build a compelling, permanent experience. 

Aggregating media from multiple systems

A media customer needed to build an application pulling data not just from their CMS, but also from a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system for imagery and rich media, a variety of external news, weather and advertising feeds, and systems for subscription management and editorial planning. 

Here, the media company delivered a compelling reader experience, even in the face of a complex and changing media landscape where not everything they needed to be successful was produced in their own newsroom.

The API Mesh: a great digital integrator

These possibilities are just the tip of the iceberg. Every organization is different, of course. But the true power of the VIP API Mesh lies in its ability to be tailored to your business’s unique needs and aspirations. 

In summary, the VIP API Mesh is a powerful tool that integrates multiple backend systems, enabling flexibility, innovation, and improved user experiences while reducing costs and overhead, providing:

• Seamless integration of backend systems for a unified digital experience
• Adaptability to evolve your digital ecosystem
• Simplified management and maintenance of your digital infrastructure

Why settle for a digital experience that falls short of your vision?

Embrace the future with WordPress VIP’s API Mesh and unleash the true power of your digital presence. Contact us now to get started.

Author

Michael Khalili, Director of Product Marketing, WordPress VIP

5 Signs It’s Time to Upgrade Your Enterprise Content Platform

Updated April 2023

According to Forrester, the majority of enterprise customer experience gains come from “finding and fixing problems, often in their back-end systems and processes.”

Content is at the heart of a digital customer experience. Addressing infrastructure problems in the content creation lifecycle helps enterprise marketers create more effective content at every stage of the customer experience journey.

If improving the quality of your digital customer experiences is a business goal this year, answering five questions can tell you if it’s time to upgrade your enterprise content platform.

1. Are there unnecessary steps in your content creation process?

Getting to market quickly is essential to delivering timely and relevant content to your audience. Unfortunately, many content platforms lack the flexibility that modern teams require. Consider how long it takes your team to move a piece of content from ideation to implementation across your channels. Is it easy for creators to bring life to your brand vision, or do you wait days for simple website updates?

Choosing an enterprise content platform that suits the needs of both your creators and developers shortcuts the content creation process by empowering everyone on your team to get their jobs done quickly.

For example, one WordPress VIP customer reported a 60% improvement in time to publish after adopting the WordPress block editor.

“We’ve probably employed 300 people in the last three years and a large percentage of those have actually used WordPress before. It’s an easier system to use,” said Joel Davies, Head of Operations at News UK.

That ease of use translates into real business value when it leads to decreased training time and higher-quality content.

Is it easy for creators to bring life to your brand vision, or do you wait days for simple website updates?

2. How much time are your developers spending on basic maintenance?

Creating innovative digital customer experiences requires technical talent. Yet in most of our conversations with prospective customers, we find their developers and engineers are spending most of their time maintaining infrastructure instead of contributing to business goals.

Talk with your technical leaders to understand where your developers are investing time. Are they free to execute your product roadmap, or are they bogged down in performance improvements and software updates?

“Using WordPress VIP means that my team can focus on being creative and innovative, rather than spending time worrying about architecture,” reported the VP of Technology of Hachette Book Group.

Promoting creativity and innovation on your technical team will not only have a significant impact on your bottom line, but can also improve employee satisfaction and retention. All that from an enterprise content platform? We see it happen every day.

3. How strong is your site performance?

Speed and performance matter in your digital customer experience. One Google study found that as page load time goes from one second to three seconds, the probability of a user bouncing increases 32%. From one second to five seconds, it increases 90%. High traffic should be a cause for celebration, but for many enterprises, it’s a cause for concern: will your site shine on your biggest day, or will it crash when you need it most?

Peace of mind is one of the biggest benefits for WordPress VIP customer FiveThirtyEight, who served 1.3 billion pageviews the week of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Through it all, WordPress VIP’s server time stayed flat at 144 milliseconds, delivering a lightning-fast experience for every visitor. Instead of worrying about performance or uptime, their team could focus on delivering content to readers all over the world.

“Using WordPress VIP means that my team can focus on being creative and innovative, rather than spending time worrying about architecture.”

Ryan Pugatch, VP Technology, Hachette Book Group

4. How easy is it to publish your content across multiple platforms?

One of the biggest challenges in consumer expectations is the “always-on” mentality. Your brand needs to deliver exactly what your customer is looking for, where they want it, when they want it, across an ever-growing number of platforms, channels, and devices.

To meet that demand, smart enterprise marketers adopt a “create once, publish everywhere” approach. Even then, it’s not easy to build a cohesive brand experience across every channel.

Rachael Trost, Product Manager at Accuweather, knew content was a key competitive advantage for her company, but her legacy CMS stunted her ability to reach their audience. So she turned to WordPress VIP to support a decoupled (or headless) WordPress setup connected to the REST API. “The headless implementation has been fantastic … to serve articles, videos, landing pages, various alerts, things like that,” she explained in a presentation on decoupled WordPress.

Are there channels you’d like to use to connect with your customer, but aren’t sure how? Instead of the one-size-fits-all approach of many digital experience platforms, your content goals are better served by an agile content platform enhanced with customizable plugins, integrations, and APIs to meet audience needs.

“We improved ease of creating content, content repurposing, flexibility, and performance by moving to WordPress VIP.”

Aviva Pinchas, Head of Growth, Parabol

Learn how Parabol uses WordPress VIP to drive growth

5. Are you paying for anything in your enterprise content platform you don’t need?

Each year, marketers are asked to do more with less.

So take a long, hard look at the cost of your current enterprise content platform. Of course, assessing your total cost of ownership can be troubling, even humbling—you might be paying too much for services you don’t use or need. Or underinvesting and limiting your growth and flexibility because your platform offers little more than hosting.

The majority of digital experience providers fall in the first category: bundling expensive solutions into what essentially becomes shelfware, or locking you into a vendor ecosystem where the answer to any problem is “Buy this new product.”

Instead, WordPress VIP works with each customer to assemble the best enterprise solutions, experts, and global agencies from the large open source community to address their unique long-term growth goals. While an enterprise content platform is always an investment, you should never pay for anything that doesn’t positively impact your revenue growth.

A better digital customer experience

As you look ahead to each year’s growth goals, remember that the biggest improvements in your digital customer experience will be made from the ground up.

Take a moment to ask yourself: “Are my content tools agile, giving my creators and developers the freedom and flexibility we need to scale engaging digital experiences? Or am I locked into pricey marketing clouds that create unnecessary obstacles for my team?”

Modern digital customer experiences require a flexibility that is hard to find outside the enterprise WordPress ecosystem. If it’s time to rethink your business’s content management infrastructure, remember: no one does content better than WordPress, the software powering 30% of the Fortune 100. And no one does enterprise WordPress better than WordPress VIP.

Get in touch to learn more

Streamlining operations for Grupo Abril

Grupo Abril, one of the largest media companies in Latin America, sought to streamline the IT sprawl that had arisen from the organic growth and development of its dozens of brands.

Taming the sprawl of organic growth

Abril’s portfolio was spread across several content management systems, including a custom Ruby On Rails system hosted in-house, another hosted via Amazon Web Services, and a Drupal-based system supported by Acquia. This system was costly and ineffective. Because of IT constraints, some brands hadn’t had a site update in ten years and as a result, had no mobile-optimized version of their site.

Unleashing greater efficiency

Abril has made major improvements in agility since standardizing with WordPress VIP. In addition to hosting and supporting Abril’s sites and providing training for developers and editorial staff, WordPress VIP manages ongoing security and performance, and serves as an end-to-end consultant for all of Abril’s content publishing development.

Shared benefits across its portfolio

New features and site launches can now be deployed with just a few days’ notice. Company resources are no longer tied up in staying up to date with third-party APIs, and Abril is now first to market with updates any time those services change. This has opened up their pipeline, and freed the organization up to focus its resources where they can have the most valuable impact – editorial and front-end work.

“We have enormously improved our efficiency since we don’t need additional teams or third parties to support our infrastructure. We can focus on what matters, which is producing content and generating value.”

Ricardo Schultz, CIO of Abril

To learn more about our work with Abril, including detailed results of their successful migration, download the executive summary.

Read now

Unlocking power and efficiency for News Corp Australia

News Corp Australia is Australia’s largest digital news network. Together, its channels see 8 million unique visits a day and 600 million page views a month.

Multiple platforms hampered growth

With 90+ brands spread across a wide range of platforms, their team suffered from inefficient workflows which hindered their growth. To position themselves for continued success, they needed a flexible enterprise-level digital publishing solution with the power to scale.

After a successful test project, News Corp Australia went all in and migrated their 90+ brands to WordPress VIP.

Agility at scale

Armed with WordPress, an agile platform that integrates seamlessly with internal systems, stakeholders are now able to contribute value to their sites in ways that were not possible before. A core suite of vetted plugins and a base theme serve as the foundation for each new site on the platform. And a new in-editor “Site Build” experience offers web producers the ability to assemble and organize an infinite combination of complex layouts—without touching code.

Major improvement in time to value

Since launching with WordPress VIP, News Corp Australia has continued to grow their digital publishing offerings, now hosting 40+ sites with WordPress VIP, and launching new assets on a regular basis. They take advantage of over 50 custom plugins, which integrate WordPress with their broader systems architecture. In many ways, this project allowed News Corp Australia to reinvent themselves and established a partnership to drive the evolution of the platform for years to come.

“[We] … cut the time it takes to build out a section of the site from days to hours. We’re so proud to be part of that success story.”

Weston Ruter, CTO at XWP

To learn more about our work with News Corp Australia, including detailed results of their successful migration, download the executive summary.

Read now

How to Build an Ecommerce Store That Scales With WordPress

After a decade of building ecommerce solutions for large organizations, Matias Saggiorato has learned a thing or two about optimizing online stores for speed and performance. Matias is CTO of WordPress VIP partner agency SAU/CAL. The agency is a certified WooCommerce expert and they’ve worked with enterprise clients like Stripe, P&G, Amazon Pay, and Phlearn.

In this talk, Matias shares how companies looking to diversify their revenue streams can build a platform that scales up to thousands of transactions per day without breaking a sweat.

Empowering Creative Content Marketing Across Remote Teams

I recently had the opportunity to present at Discover MarTech, a virtual conference focused on marketing technology and management. My goal was to help fellow marketing managers see the silver lining in something many teams are struggling with right now: how to stay creative as we navigate the new culture of remote work.

Automattic, WordPress VIP’s parent company, has always been a fully remote workplace. Well, actually, we prefer the term “distributed,” because there are no central, physical, headquarters.

Each Automattician (which is what we call ourselves) works from a home office, or a local co-working space, a coffee shop, really, just about anywhere that has a good internet connection.

No such thing as “normal”

Right now, though, that list of possible locations has been whittled down to just one: the home office. And perhaps not the normal home office. It’s now the home office you can never leave. The home office with kids, with partners, and with a makeshift homeschool. Or the home office for one, on a bed in a tiny studio apartment.

So for us, the “new normal” of remote work that so many other companies have been thrust into is both incredibly familiar, and completely new. This is not normal remote work, even for us.

Shared values drive agility

The good news, though, is that being distributed actually enables us to be creative in a more agile way. That’s in large part thanks to the values and culture at the root of our workplace, and how our strategies and tools for remote work allow us to reach out to each other across teams, locations, and time zones.

I’m happy to share the recording of my 15-minute talk, which covers:

• How values like agility, stability, accountability, flexibility, and authenticity inform the way we work, and how defining your own values can have a similar impact on your team
• The role of open-source software in creating the stability and consistency we need to grow
• The tools we use to improve collaboration across cross-functional teams in multiple time zones

Watch the video here:

If you have any questions or ideas, I’d love to talk more about this topic. I have so much empathy for everyone who is juggling life in a new way. When it comes to navigating our current reality, we’re all in this together.