Multiple Environments Feature in Flamelink, a Firebase CMS
Initially, as a non-techie, I wasn’t sure how setting Flamelink up to work at the beach, in a rainforest or in the belly of an active volcano would help anyone, but hey, what you choose to use Firebase and Flamelink for, is frankly none of my business.
JK: Having worked as an Account Manager in a tech company before, I’ve learnt the value in testing out new features in an environment that isn’t your live project — you only make that mistake once (or twice).
One of the things we’re passionate about, is helping make the lives of Flamelink users easier, and while the core of Flamelink itself isn’t open-source, our approach has been user-driven experience and pain-point resolution. Sometimes this has been pretty easy, in that our team have been able to push out quick fixes and workarounds — other times it’s taken a little longer to offer a solution.
Flamelink’s Multiple Environment support is an example of this. It allows you to keep all your content in one place (so it’s super easy to keep track of) and extract the data you need for specific projects — this setup is also a massive advantage of the headless CMS configuration and the flexible content delivery it allows users on different devices.
Where it works?
- 1) Production vs Sandbox
We’ve set the multiple environments functionality in Flamelink up for you to very easily pull/push data from your different environments — literally with the click of a button. Boom.
This is helpful if you’ve got your live site set up and you want to make some changes to your content or how your content is displayed. You can duplicate the live data into your newly set up sandbox environment and your content homie/client/second-cousin can go nuts.
- 2) Different Devices like your App, Website and Smartwatch for example
The content you’d require for each device is really different, so instead of creating a new project for each of these, you can duplicate the content for each of them and add or remove what you do or don’t need. So you can optimize the experience for each device to give your end users a great user experience at every touch point where they interact with your product.
This probably goes without saying, but in order to help keep track of what data goes where, you’ve got the ability to name your environments individually, which makes it helpful for teams working on the same project to be on the same page (Ha! See what I did there?).
Switch (and lock) it up:
It’s really easy to switch between different environments should you need to for whatever reason. We’ve also built in some safety measures so you can limit certain users to certain environments — so you won’t have to worry about users fiddling with content in production.
The official Flamelink SDK — Use That!
Flamelink’s official JavaScript SDK lets you specify which environment you want to work with, contextualising all your requests and making it really simple to work with each of your different environments. Dive into Flamelink’s official JavaScript SDK.
If you need any help, feel free to get in touch via Slack, we’d love to hear from you.
Follow us here:
*Previously published in Hackernoon.
