FAQ
You can start a free trial here anytime you want. As Content Sync sits between your sites, we need HTTP / REST access to your sites so you can’t run Content Sync in a local development environment, unfortunately. Instead, please use one of your dev/test/stage/QA environments that are publicly accessible (or protected by Basic Auth). Alternatively, you can also use a cloud IDE like Gitpod to have a dev environment that Content Sync can also access from the outside.
If you struggle at any point just reach out to our support in the chat or through our ticketing system here.
There are a couple of factors that influence the price of Content Sync. The most important ones are the number of sites you connect and the number of updates you want to make per month. To get a detailed price for your use-case please use our quote form or reach out to us directly.
Our typical customer has 20-50 sites and wants to synchronize content between those sites, but we also have customers with only 1 production site and others with 100s of connected sites. The more sites you have and the more content you synchronize, the higher the value is that we provide. And while most customers are looking for a solution to manage content at scale, we also have customers that are more concerned about compliance issues with Drupal who use Content Sync to stage content in a private content entry site before publishing it through Content Sync to their content delivery site.
If you are not sure whether Content Sync is a good fit, let us know your use-case and we’ll help you understand where we can and cannot help.
You can! Just click on the “View progress” link after pushing a piece of content or open the “Content Cloud” tab (called “Content Repository” for on-premise customers). You can see the overall progress across all sites and also the progress per site in the Details list. If anything goes wrong, this tab will also let you know all the relevant details for debugging and solving the issue.
There’s even a central overview of all updates available in the “Synchronize Content” tab at the Content Sync settings pages. You can view all running updates, past updates, failed updates and even show the updates across all sites to always understand what’s happening.
You can! We provide an interactive pull dashboard that your editors can use to search for content. You can even add your own previews! Besides standard filters like the entity type, editors also have a full text search available that looks into the preview that you’ve shared. By including taxonomy terms and other relevant data in the preview, your editors can easily find any piece of content and pull it into their site by the click of a button.
You can! The most convenient way for editors is to choose from a list of Taxonomy terms per content item. You can then use your Flow configurations to filter content by these terms, per site. Your taxonomy terms can either be a 1:1 representation of your sites (so every target site is one term) or you can group sites e.g. by specific topics or features to further simplify content management for your editors.
Absolutely! In fact, we recommend not allowing local changes in most use-cases. This helps with streamlining your editor’s processes; the more sites your editors have to visit, log in to and manage, the more complicated their work becomes. By reducing the number of sites your editors use for content entry, their work becomes significantly easier and more efficient.
But if you only have a handful of sites or they don’t share the same content this may not apply to you and you’re better off allowing local changes.
We don’t require any specific hosting provider, but some of them do require some additional settings. If you are unsure about this, please reach out to us and we’re happy to help.
If you are using a WAF please whitelist our IP addresses that you can find here.
We are running a service called the “Sync Core” that sits between your sites and handles all the heavy lifting. This Sync Core can also be hosted on-premise.
Absolutely! We recommend adding Content Sync to your regular test environments (usually called “dev”, “test”, “QA”, “stage” or “UAT”) to ensure the safety of all deployments. That’s why testing with Content Sync is 100% free, allowing you to connect as many test sites as you like completely free of charge.
We are using tons of automated tests to ensure Content Sync always works. But with Drupal there’s really nothing that you can’t do and so it’s simply not possible to cover all potential circumstances. If you are using Content Sync in an environment that requires >99% availability of content synchronization features, we recommend adding automated integration tests to your own test environment(s) to increase your release confidence. We’ve set up a lot of such tests already so we’re happy to help you with that, too.
Content Sync provides a lot of customization options through the Flow configuration you can create per site. There’s also an Advanced section available for even more options at the last page of the Flow form.
We already support all the most used contrib modules’ fields and entities (see here for a full list). To see if everything you need for your site is supported you can head over to the Compatibility tab that’s available at the Content Sync configuration pages after installing the module.
If you have custom entity or field types that you need support for you can also create your own Entity Handler and Field Handler to tell Content Sync how to serialize and deserialize the data. We also trigger Drupal events before and after every push and pull to allow you to customize the data before it leaves and before it enters your sites and to make additional changes to created or updated entities.
Content Sync works with thousands of sites and hundreds of thousands of updates a month.
In terms of functionality there is one restriction: we don’t synchronize user accounts due to the severe security implications. Please use alternatives like SAML, OAuth, LDAP or Active Directory instead.
All important operations in Content Sync works asynchronously to improve performance, reliability, and scalability. We have a special application called the “Sync Core” that sits between your sites. Whenever your sites want to push or pull content, they talk to this service. All content that is pushed from your sites is stored in the Sync Core and then distributed to other sites either immediately or on request, depending on how you configure Content Sync. When you delete content, that content is also deleted in the Sync Core (unless you configure Content Sync to not delete content).
We don’t share or sell your data with other organizations outside of what’s necessary to operate the service (e.g., we need to store your data in a database which involves a hosting provider). We are also 100% compliant with GDPR as one of the strictest privacy laws.
We do keep copies of old data in our system for up to 12 months as backups that allow us to recover from a failure (“disaster recovery”). If you accidentally pushed sensitive data to Content Sync please let us know so we can remove it for you.
The Sync Core can also be hosted on-premise.
We are running a service called the “Sync Core” that sits between your sites and handles all the heavy lifting. You can also host this Sync Core yourself e.g. because your sites are in a private network or you must follow very strict data protection policies that don’t allow SaaS providers. The technical documentation for the Sync Core is available here, including the technical requirements. On-premise hosting is significantly more expensive and requires more work from your end than using our cloud service so we recommend using our cloud service where possible. Please reach out to us if you would like to learn more about on-premise hosting.
You can! We offer a 10% discount or sales commission in that case for all Enterprise contracts so the more sites you connect, the more you earn as a referral while you remain the one face to your customer. Please reach out to us before your purcahse in this case.
We also offer white labelling for larger re-sellers. Just reach out to us if you are interested.
Content Sync is a no-code solution to synchronize content between all of your Drupal sites. Let editors pick and choose what content items they want to share with or import from other sites or fully automate the update process for all your standard content. Typical workflows for universities include:
- Managing basic pages / default content centrally for all sites.
- Sharing articles and events between multiple sites.
- Rolling out profiles to all the relevant e.g. department sites and letting people update their own profile centrally.
- Registering all content centrally for a university-wide search.
We also provide a 10% discount to colleges, universities and NGOs for all Enterprise contracts. Just reach out to us before you purchase.
We offer reliability, scalability, customizability, and technical support that you can rely on. But most importantly we have many happy customers to prove it, including enterprises like Nestlé, MINI or BMW. And we’re happy to introduce you to them, too, so you can ask your own questions.
Content Sync offers a no-code solution that’s much easier to setup and maintain than any custom development. We have 6+ years of experience with content synchronization in Drupal and we’ve written over 200,000 lines of code to provide you with the reliability, scalability, and customizability we have today. Just writing that amount of code would keep an average of 8 full-time developers busy for a whole year. Then you will very likely have many painful learnings on the way, you will need a great deal of test automation, and all of that doesn’t even account for the operational costs for hosting and supporting the service.
We on the other hand can provide you the same value for a much lower price because we can split most of the costs across many customers while lowering your time to market and reducing the risk of failures and overspend.
There’s no competing product that provides you with the same reliability, scalability, customizability, and technical support that we have. Content Sync also works on any hosting provider (Including Pantheon, Acquia Cloud, Amazee, Platform.sh and custom solutions), so there is no vendor lock-in. But you don’t have to listen to us- listen to our customers instead! We’re happy to introduce you to customers who switched over from competitors and custom solutions so you can ask them your own questions.
P.S. if you want to switch over from an existing setup, we’re happy to help you out with our migration automation. Just reach out to us to learn more.
We have added many useful tools over the years to help you troubleshoot all kinds of potential issues, many with their own UI:
- If a piece of content is not pushed or pulled, we will always try to show this to the affected user and log it to Drupal. So, the best place to start is usually in the Drupal logs. If you see an error there that you can’t decipher, please reach out to us with the exact error message, the call stack, and a description of what you’re trying to achieve.
- If an update is not arriving at another site, please open the content at the source site and open the Content Cloud tab (called “Content Repository” for on-premise customers). This tab shows the progress of the synchronization and allows you to see a list of all destinations and the status of the update per site. If there’s an issue you can expand the item in the list and click “Details” to see the exact request that we’ve made including the request and response body. In case of failures, the response body usually includes the exact error message and call stack from the remote site as well. You can also use this request information to retry the sync yourself e.g., with Postman.
- We retry failed requests multiple times in a 24h timeframe to automatically recover from temporary failures.
- If someone else reported an issue and you’re having difficulties finding the right log message, please enable our “Health” sub-module and navigate to Content > Sync Health > Entity Status. This list contains the status of all entities we’ve ever tried to push or pull. You can filter this list by entity type, flow, pool, sync status, and you can filter nodes by title to find the entity in question. This list includes the errors that were encountered when we tried to push or pull an item.
Please keep in mind that you always have manual updates as a workaround so that critical updates can still be published without our automation. This is important to consider when estimating the criticality of our service and when creating your WebOps playbook.
Content Sync will retry all failed updates multiple times in a timeframe of 24h to automatically recover from temporary failures. If you are unsure about how to troubleshoot issues, please checkout What if a synchronization / update fails.
After 24h the update will be marked as failed. Once you have resolved the issue you can restart the update by clicking “Retry” when viewing the update e.g. in the “Content Cloud” tab at the content or the “Synchronize Content” tab in the Content Sync settings pages. If you have a lot of failures from one specific issue and don’t want to retry them all manually you can also use a “Retry failed” mass update to restart all updates that failed before.