Ok. So clickbaity headlines notwithstanding, over the last few months we’ve been hard at work to get Flamelink, a headless CMS for Firebase, out of beta with some really great refinements and suggestions from our amazing early adopters. We’ve also been helping a bunch of Devs new to the Firebase page get started with hooking Flamelink up to their Firebase projects. And that’s only the behind-the-scenes stuff. We’re pretty excited to share one of the projects we’ve been able to implement a Firebase x Flamelink solution for.
NOTE: This article may or may not be peppered with sporting puns…
Before we dive into the project: Wanna know more about Flamelink, a Firebase CMS? Check this out:
Old Mutual’s Challenge:
Old Mutual, a Fortune Global 500 company, needed to launch their ‘World of Endurance’ platform before the 2017 Comrades Marathon, the world’s largest and oldest ultramarathon. Old Mutual wanted to give South African endurance athletes a hub to get expert advice from top endurance specialists on topics like nutrition, training guides, injury recovery, running & cycling gear, and motivational stuff to help all athletes from the 5km fun runner (like me) through to the weekend warrior doing their twentieth triathlon.
The World of Endurance hub: Get Great Advice from top endurance athletes and specialists.
The Firebase x Flamelink Solution:
In a race against time due to some pretty tight internal deadlines, we needed to find a solution that would be quick off the mark. Our proposed solution of Firebase combined with Flamelink, a headless CMS for Firebase gave Old Mutual a fast, secure, scalable, realtime solution with features not yet available to them at the time — an easy-to-use content management system to continuously add, manage and update content.
This one-two Firebase & Flamelink combo gave our team the flexibility to quickly build custom schemas which allowed us to hit the ground running and start development almost immediately, rather than losing valuable time getting the backend set up.
Because of the Frontend Flexibility offered by Firebase & Flamelink, we were able to build the Frontend on the latest Angular framework, something our team was really comfortable working in and allowed us to not be hamstrung* by a specific framework dictated by certain stacks. (*Ok so this pun only gets half marks).
At the end of the day, we believe that Developers should be able to work within a framework or language that they’re comfortable with to confidently deliver on their project deadlines. Which is why Flamelink’s headless solution handles content for you. No mess. No fuss.
Levels…
Show me the Results:
Firebase and Flamelink allowed our team to quickly set up content schemas for this project and helped us cross the finish line with the World of Endurance platform on time.
Onboarding the Old Mutual team was also really easy, due to the simple way Flamelink’s interface is set up and they were able to effortlessly update content ranging from videos, podcasts and articles in their World of Endurance Firebase project.
The site was also a finalist in the 2018 Bookmarks awards, under the Specialist Publishing site category.
We were able to deliver a polished, robust solution that is ready to facilitate the new features and integrations we’ve already started working on with the Old Mutual team to provide South African endurance athletes with the ultimate hub to Get Great Advice and take their performance to the next level.
World of Endurance was a finalist in the 2018 Bookmarks awards, in the Specialist Publishing site category.
Building something cool on Firebase & Flamelink?
Are you working on something interesting that you’re using Firebase and Flamelink for? Let me know in the comments below. I’d love to hear what you’re building.
Want to know more?
Visit Flamelink.io.
Get started with Flamelink with this helpful guide/tutorial:
Join Flamelink’s Slack Workspace to chat to our Developers (and send us more sporting puns).
Follow Flamelink on Twitter.