What is Contentful? Why do you need it?

I’ve found that the Contentful landing pages are doing a pretty bad job explaining just what it does, rather than their benefits. Anyhow, what Contentful is, is:

A system to help you separate Content management and Content publication.

You put the database for your contents into their cloud, so that you can edit them with WYSIWYG editors. Then, you pull the data into your app as JSON objects.

For example, if you want a highly customized blogging system, but don’t want to deal with the overhead of editing wordpress templates, Contentful can give you a nice user friendly editor for adding blog posts. With that, in your code, you can simply REST-fully retrieve your posts, then display them.