Unleash the possibilities for your business with IFX
Arc XP’s Integration Framework (IFX) offers a hosted SaaS set of capabilities that enable you to easily extend, integrate, and customize your Arc XP environment. IFX dramatically increases the flexibility of the Arc XP platform by providing a quick, secure means of writing custom code to satisfy your use cases.
With the introduction of IFX, you now have a hosted option to further simplify your stack and consolidate onto Arc XP.
High-level capabilities
Build custom integrations when you want how you want, reducing time-to-market
Integrate directly with Arc XP products
Integrate with third-party and proprietary systems
Access to logs and metrics, reducing debugging time
Manage integrations and deployments through APIs
IFX consists of integrations. An integration is hosted code where you can write your custom logic. You can decide which events you want your integration to receive from Arc XP applications. For example, when a story is updated in Composer, an event is emitted called story:update. If you have an IFX integration listening for this event, you can write a handler to receive the event and its payload/data, and then perform your custom logic, such as automatically adding tags to the story.
The following diagram illustrates this flow:
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IFX Basics
Integrations allow you to interact with other platforms and insert custom logic into the workflow. With IFX doing all of the hard work in the background for you, it’s easy to get up and running quickly using the IFX Node.js SDK.
Events are sent to IFX from Arc XP applications. When an event is emitted, IFX can invoke your integration where a handler can receive the event and its data—ANS, for example—and then apply custom logic.
To receive events, you must subscribe to them and specify which integration the event should invoke.
Developer Experience
The developer experience is a fundamental part of the product’s mission, and IFX Engine is its core. Coupled with IFX SDKs, the hard part is done for you. When you create a new integration, everything you need to run IFX is automatically created. You can just start writing code.
Web application security can be complex, making it challenging to manage, but IFX Engine applies this automatically, adhering to Arc XP’s high security standards. As a result, the need for engineers to manage complex infrastructure is eliminated.
In addition, a great developer experience requires access to great resources. IFX comes with ever-evolving technical documentation, example code, and guidelines for integration best practices. We want this to be as easy as possible, so share your suggestions on our Ideas Portal.
Why use IFX?
Extending the Arc XP platform has always been possible, but it requires setting up and hosting your own servers and infrastructure. This might require a more experienced developer who knows how to use AWS, manage security, and maintain this infrastructure long term. What if you didn't have to worry about any of that? What if you could use an IFX API to create an integration and start writing code within minutes?
Imagine the time it would take to set up your own infrastructure—it requires planning, solution design, implementation, testing, deployments, etc. All of this would cost you and your developers weeks or months before you saw any progress. IFX enables your development team to begin writing code in minutes.
IFX is the place where you can create your custom apps (called integrations) to hook into important workflows and easily perform custom transformations. Within your IFX integrations, you can do pretty much anything you want.
Did we mention IFX integrations are hosted by Arc XP? The IFX team maintains the hard parts for you — the complex infrastructure, security, a secure secrets manager, scaling, and more. This enables you to create an integration and just start writing code.
That said, what are your extensibility needs? Sync an external system's data with Arc XP data? Automate Newsletters using WebSked Publication events? Transform your story data before sending it off to a print service? The possibilities are endless, but this article is designed to spark some inspiration with common use cases, so you can visualize how IFX can help you easily accomplish these tasks.
Cost comparisons
An important thing to remember about using IFX is the significant time and cost savings for your business. IFX manages the infrastructure — and all the goodies that go on behind the scenes — for you. When creating an integration, you are provided with a foundational package that enables you to just start writing code, including out-of-the-box modules, connections to our SDKs, HTTP connectors, local testing tools, and more.
With your team not having to worry about planning, building, and maintaining a complete infrastructure and a full application from scratch, you can focus on the fun parts. IFX frees up your developers to get to coding within a few minutes. Not only that, we also provide recipes for common use cases that your developers can use, and only need to make minor code changes if necessary. Plus, we are always creating more recipes to make your integrations plug-and-play.
Let us walk through a six-month scenario where you have decided to host your servers and infrastructure. Estimating one developer's labor cost for infrastructure development and ongoing maintenance at $10,000/mo, and one developer's labor cost for integration development at $6,000/mo.
Note
These are only examples and are not meant to reflect the exact costs of your business.
Task | Self-Hosted | Using IFX |
|---|---|---|
Complete infrastructure development | 6+ months | 0 |
Running integration(s) infrastructure | Forever | 0 |
Integration development | 3 months (after infrastructure is complete) | With 1 developer:
|
Managing your own Kinesis (Content) events
Do you use Arc XP's Kinesis streams? See Getting Started with Kinesis Content Event Stream. Let us take a moment to compare hosting your servers to listen for Content Events vs. using IFX.
To start, you'll need to set up your AWS account. Here is a rough outline of the steps you would take:
Set up an AWS account if you don't already have one
Provide Arc with your AWS Account ID
Request Arc to create two IAM roles
Request Arc grant access within Arc's AWS for one of the roles
Grant Kinesis access with your AWS to the other account
Figure out Kinesis (good luck)
Configure your .env and AWS profile
Set up version control for the integration
Develop your integration locally
Set up a build pipeline
Set up a deployment pipeline
Set up logging for your app
Set up monitoring
Set up alerting
Build & deploy your app
How long does this take? Weeks. If you know what you're doing.
Next, you will need to receive the Kinesis messages and figure out what to do with them.
These messages can not only be noisy, but also difficult to parse and understand which of the many messages you need to perform an action. For example, when a story is published, you will receive ~12 messages, all with different ANS data. Which of these 12 messages do you use to know a story was published?
IFX has greatly simplified this for you, so you only receive one event per user action. In the event menu, you can see each event you will receive, and when the event is sent.
Note
We currently support only story events, but will soon support more Kinesis event streams.
Now that you have super-simplified event messages, you can stop worrying about confusing messaging and write far less code.
Let us get more specific. Below are example use cases for which IFX can be used.
What kind of problems can IFX solve for my business?
Use IFX Story Events to quickly enrich and syndicate your content
IFX empowers you to customize and extend the Arc XP platform to meet your unique content and workflow needs. Quickly transform your data to synchronize it with third-party systems, and turn your complex workflows into highly efficient, automated processes.
Resources:
Event menu for a list of story events
Recipe: IFX Node.js Recipe: Send story data to an external application. This starter recipe applies to several of the workflows described below.
Automatically add SEO-rich tags to your stories
Manually adding tags to a story can take time and thought. With IFX, when a story is published, use AI to auto-generate story tags so editors do not have to manage these and can quickly move on to their next tasks. Within your integration, add these to the ANS and save them into the Draft API.
Perform verification on story links
Have you ever read an article where some links were broken or took you to a “Not Found” page? Having broken links in your story may cause readers to become frustrated and abandon the article. With IFX, you can ensure this doesn't happen. When a story is published, use IFX to parse all its links to ensure they resolve properly, improving the reader experience. If there are any issues with the links, you could set the Workflow Status to “Needs Review” or create a new task in WebSked for an editor to review the story.
Automatically add affiliate program links to stories
Affiliate programs can help businesses generate extra income. These marketing links are thoughtfully placed throughout an article, and when a reader clicks one, it is tracked as a sale. Adding these links manually can be time-consuming.
With IFX, you can automate inserting these links. When a story is published, your integration listens for the event story:first-publish. The body content is sent off to a third party to convert the appropriate links to affiliate links. The IFX integration waits for a response from the external service, and after validation, adds the body content back into story.
Use IFX and WebSked Events to automate processes
See the event menu for a list of WebSked events.
WebSked now sends events directly to IFX. You can listen for these events and perform custom actions, making your more complex workflows much easier to manage.
Send your readers push notifications
Browser push notifications can help drive reader engagement. For example, when a breaking news story is published, your IFX integration formats and sends the headline, subheadline, and featured image to the push notification system of your choice, which will distribute this alert to your supported publishing channels.
Notify users of breaking news
Readers may miss breaking news, unless they are alerted to it. Use your favorite third-party platform to create a breaking news alert, and for example, send the headline and the first 300 words of the story.
Get content into your email newsletters quickly
IFX lets you control your newsletter data and formatting, automatically responding to the WebSked event and sending the email off for you. An example is an “Editor's pick” that goes out every morning at 6am. Pitch stories to this Publication, and when the publication is finalized, WebSked sends the websked:edition_finalize event to IFX. From here, you format your data and send it off to your favorite Newsletter Service Provider. See SendGrid email service connector.
Make print planning easier
Pitch stories to the Print Group. When the group owner is ready to send the stories to the print system, they choose to Finalize the Edition. WebSked sends the websked:edition_finalize event to your IFX integration, where it re-pulls the list of stories from the Content API to ensure you have the latest data. Format the data as needed, and send it to the Print System. Finally, send an update to WebSked's API to mark any outstanding tasks as complete.
Send notifications to your team
Automated notifications increase the speed of a newsroom's operational processes. Combine WebSked's exceptional workflow management system with IFX to see even more time-saving with automated notifications. For example, use websked:task_deadline_approaching to send a reminder message through Slack, Teams, or send email notifications.
Another notification that might be useful for your editorial team is when a Platform Pitch is accepted or denied. From there, they can take any necessary action.
Manage social media syndication
Pitch a story websked:pitch_create to the social media platform, then send a Slack notification so the platform owner can add the story to the queue for syndication. When the Edition is finalized, websked:edition_finalize, send the list of stories to the social syndication system.
Automatically translate an article with Generative AI
A story is written in Composer in Spanish, and it needs to be translated into Portuguese, so the editor pitches it to the Portuguese translation Platform. This sends an event to your IFX integration, sending the content to an external system to be translated, such as GPT. The integration receives the story back in Portuguese and creates a new story using Draft API, setting the language value. Finally, a new task is created using WebSked's APIs to alert the appropriate team to review the translation before publishing, using Slack or Email.
Composer send to print button
Composer's Send to Print button lets editors send a story directly to print using a Webhook. Still, this may sometimes require you to maintain your middleware. In the coming months, Composer will offer a new option where you can set your Send to Print button to send this event off to your IFX integration and perform any custom logic or validation before sending it off to the print service. Stay tuned for more on this.
How can I get IFX for my organization?
IFX is automatically available for customers. Contact Arc XP Customer Support for more information.
Resources
Next up: Create an Integration
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