The Challenge: Escaping the Legacy Content Trap
ANiFiT, a leading Swiss pet nutrition company, relies on a vast network of independent consultants for its direct sales model. Their internal consultant platform - the "Cockpit" - is the mission control for this network, providing essential resources like training materials, product catalogues, events, and important company news.
The historical problem was a painful one: ANiFiT was trapped in a legacy, self-developed CMS. It was notoriously rigid, slow, and not user-friendly, making content maintenance a chore that no editor enjoyed. Updates were cumbersome, and the idea of adapting content for multiple digital channels was a non-starter.
For a business operating on an agile sales model, this simply wasn't scalable. Our Job-to-be-Done was to replace the legacy system with a central, joyful content hub that could not only empower non-technical editors across three languages (DE, FR, IT) but also serve as the future backbone for their public website. They needed true Headless liberation.
The ongoing Solution: Data Orchestration with DatoCMS
ongoing partnered with ANiFiT to dismantle the content complexity. Our approach leveraged DatoCMS as the definitive source of truth for all consultant-facing content. We didn't just 'integrate' a CMS; we built a content delivery system designed for editorial speed, security, and maximum future leverage.
Crucially, we used DatoCMS not just for editorial content, but as the data orchestrator. By heavily utilising DatoCMS's Content Management API, we created seamless, automatic integrations:
The Product Information Management (PIM) system (Akeneo) synchronises the entire product catalogue directly into DatoCMS.
The Event Management System pushes all training and webinar data straight into DatoCMS.
This means editors no longer manage this complex data manually; they simply enrich and publish it from a single, clean interface. The system is robust, proving that DatoCMS is perfectly suited for complex, data-rich internal applications, not just simple marketing websites.
A note on Technical Ownership: Developing a Custom DAST Renderer
A significant technical hurdle we tackled was the DatoCMS Structured Text field (DAST). Since the ANiFiT Cockpit runs on PHP/Symfony and no official DAST parser was available for PHP, we rolled our sleeves up and built one ourselves. This custom renderer handles a lot different node types (headings, lists, links, etc.), ensuring structured content is perfectly translated into both HTML for display and plain text for OpenSearch indexing.
This control over the rendering logic also granted us an elegant solution for performance. DatoCMS uses standard cache tags in its API responses. By hooking into these tags and using Symfony's TagAwareCacheInterface, we made cache invalidation automatically efficient and dead simple, real-time content updates without the usual cache headaches.
The Outcome: Control, Confidence, and Content that Works
The project delivered the single most important outcome: liberation from the legacy system. ANiFiT's content owners have moved from a system that was "no fun" to one that supports their actual job.
The implementation proves a powerful point: DatoCMS, when used as an API-first content hub is an ideal foundation for complex, data-heavy applications that demand both high performance and maximum editorial flexibility. The ANiFiT Consultant Cockpit is now a digital asset that supports their market strategy and sets the stage for future growth, rather than being an internal bottleneck.
