Content Management System (CMS)
For all the editorial content on the portal one CMS is used to offer the possibility to non-developper person to add content.
Ghost: headless CMS
The choice went for the open source CMS Ghost, replacing Wordpress as our first choice at the beginning of the project.
Whereas it's not perfect and there is still room for improvement, this is a great tool to use to create content in a beautiful user interface. The API allows us to get all the information needed for the web application by a REST API.
Hooks for indexing it inside Elasticsearch
The CMS offers a hooks functionnality. Put it simply, you can trigger any API call after some events. In our case, after saving a page or an article, the Elasticsearch (ES) indexer service will be called to re-index the article or the page which was just modified. In few seconds the modification will be visible inside the webapp without any manual manipulation.
Integration into the webapp
After the content is indexed inside ES, very little work is needed to integrate it into the web application.
The content actually retrieved as HTML, and the code is pretty clean, so very few CSS adjustment is needed to display a nice article.