#cloud cms

Cloud CMS now provides a left-hand Folder Tree in the Folders view. Although a relatively simple feature, the left-hand Folder Tree makes navigation between folders much easier and is a familiar way to view and navigate content.

The left-hand Folder tree can be enabled or disabled from the Project Settings page (set to disabled by default).

After the left-hand Folder Tree is enabled, it can then be seen under Browse By Folder. If a folder contains one or more folders within it, then there is an arrow pointing towards the folder. If the arrow is clicked on then it turns to point down at the new subset of folders. This hierarchical structure of folders makes it easier to understand where you are and to jump around between locations.

Any questions?

Cloud CMS is incredibly powerful and feature rich. This is great except that in exposing all the powerful features the UI can easily appear cluttered and difficult to use.

We recently added the ability to customize the UI to declutter, simplify, and make more familiar.

Navigation

The UI has been simplified to make navigation easier. The number of left-hand menu options has decreased because of the new “Manage Platform” and “Manage Project” sections. These two new sections have moved all of the administrative and developer links into a separate place. This has allowed for the UI navigation to become much simpler for editorial teams because the set of menu items is much smaller, making items easier to find.

Example:

Default Document View

Updated Document Menu Settings

Updated Document View

Dashboards

A new feature of Cloud CMS are the platform and project level dashboards. Through a drag-and-drop feature, administrators and users are able to configure their tools and views. Users have the ability to customize layouts and decide the particular dashlets wanted of their home page. Administrators decide the levels of customization users are allowed to have, with their ability to lock things down as necessary on a per-project basis.

Platform Dashboard layout

Any questions?

Cloud CMS lets you easily design and deploy forms for your web applications and content contributors. In this blog entry, we'll walk through how you can do this within the Cloud CMS user interface.

In this example, we'll create a form that allows editors to create City Guide information. Note: in the Cloud CMS Trial there is a City Guide Content definition which can be used as a starting point or as a reference for this example.

Add a Definition

The Content Definitions can be found in the Cloud CMS project:

Next, we need to Create a new Definition. We begin by telling Cloud CMS what a City Guide is. This is a bit like defining a word in the dictionary. We will define a "City Guide" and tell Cloud CMS what schema it should have. The schema describes the properties, types, constraints and structure of the content.

When someone fills out the form, Cloud CMS can then capture the content and store it in a way that is searchable and reusable.

Click Create Definition.

We provide a few properties for our new definition including a qname which defines a unique key (kind of like a dictionary "word") which is ours.

Now we define the schema of this definition. Cloud CMS uses JSON Schema for content modeling.

{ "title": "Guide City", "type": "object", "properties": { "title": { "type": "string", "title": "Title" }, "summary": { "type": "string", "title": "Summary" }, "body": { "type": "string", "title": "Body" }, "state": { "type": "string", "title": "State" }, "loc": { "type": "object", "title": "Location", "properties": { "latitude": { "type": "number", "title": "Latitude" }, "longitude": { "type": "number", "title": "Longitude" } } }, "highlights": { "type": "array", "items": { "type": "string" }, "title": "Highlights" }, "testimonials": { "type": "array", "items": { "type": "object", "properties": { "text": { "type": "string", "title": "Text" }, "author": { "type": "string", "title": "Author" } } }, "title": "Testimonials" } }, "_parent": "n:node", "description": "guide:cityexample", "$schema": "http://json-schema.org/draft-04/schema#" }

If happy with your edits you can now save our definition. Cloud CMS instantly compiles the definition with no server restarts and no downtime. The Contentent Definition Overview shows us that our definition is loaded up and ready to go.

Add a Form

So far, we've defined what a City Guide is. That is to say, we've defined the model for a City Guide. We now want to add a form that can be used to create new City Guide content instances.

Cloud CMS lets you have many forms for a single definition. You might choose have one form for administration that shows all fields and gets down and dirty. You might have another form that simplifies things, has a simple layout and is intended for users on a web site.

Click Form List which will list all the available Forms for the Type Definition - there are none since it is a new definition. Let's create a simple form. All we have to do is click on Create Form.

We now provide some configuration for our form. We can do many things here such as modify the layout, the placement of fields, plug in custom templates and configure different kinds of fields (or controls) for our field elements.

Let's use the following configuration to customize the fields for our form:

{ "title": "Guide City example", "fields": { "title": { "type": "text", "label": "Title" }, "summary": { "type": "textarea", "label": "Summary" }, "body": { "type": "ckeditor", "label": "Body", "ckeditor": { "toolbar": [ [ "Format", "Font", "FontSize" ], [ "Bold", "Italic", "Underline", "StrikeThrough", "-", "Undo", "Redo", "-", "Cut", "Copy", "Paste", "Find", "Replace", "-", "Outdent", "Indent", "-", "Print" ], "/", [ "NumberedList", "BulletedList", "-", "JustifyLeft", "JustifyCenter", "JustifyRight", "JustifyBlock" ], [ "Image", "Table", "-", "Link", "Flash", "Smiley", "TextColor", "BGColor", "Source" ] ] } }, "state": { "type": "state", "label": "State" }, "loc": { "type": "object", "label": "Location", "fields": { "latitude": { "type": "number", "label": "Latitude" }, "longitude": { "type": "number", "label": "Longitude" } } } }, "engineId": "alpaca1", "_form_key": "master" }

As you can see, each field has been given a label and a type. The type identifies which field control to use.

We now save our form. Cloud CMS automatically compiles the form and brings it online.

Create Content using our Form

Now we can create content using our form.

In left nav, click Content - a list all the content types will be displayed.

Select the content type you have just created

click Create Content

Notice that Cloud CMS automatically fires validation logic for things like required files. The Cloud CMS forms engine is very configurable and provides drop downs for selectors, date pickers, custom formatters and much more.

Any questions?

Cloud CMS introduces a Single Sign-On service that will make it easy for the users to connect using their already existing business accounts.

Cloud CMS supports two Enterprise SSO features – SAML 2.0 and JWT. These are two popular SSO mechanisms that work with many commercial and open-source identity providers including Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), JBoss Keycloak etc.

Using SAML 2.0 and JWT, Cloud CMS can be easily integrated with your corporate security infrastructure. Users who log in using either SAML or JWT will have their accounts automatically created and synchronized within Cloud CMS. Cloud CMS will not have any password information stored since the username/password sign on happens somewhere else. Not just the custom user properties but even the groups from either the JWT payloads or SAML assertions can be mapped into Cloud CMS letting the information be synchronized.

Try this feature out yourself using SAML 2.0:

Log into Cloud CMS as a user who has Manager rights over the platform. Usually this is the administrator of the platform or someone on the DevOps/IT side.

On the left-side, select Platform Settings.

On the sub-menu, select SSO.

To enable SSO using SAML, select “SAML 2.0” from the selection list. Next step is to configure the settings like providing the URL of the Identity Provider you want to redirect to and the field mappings which lets you synchronize the user properties from the identity provider into Cloud CMS.

SAML 2.0 merely describes the redirection of the browser to the identity provider, the login and the POST back to Cloud CMS of the assertion. Once Cloud CMS receives the assertion, it will sync the user and then authenticate as that user (through its own means).

Try this feature out yourself using JWT:

Go to Platform Settings > SSO.

Select JWT from the list as below

The configuration screens look like:

Once the JWT is configured, requests coming into Cloud CMS are expected to have a header or a cookie that contains a JWT token. This token is used to identify the user and also map the user properties with Cloud CMS to have synchronization.

Provide the necessary information as above. Further, you can provide the field mappings to synchronize the user properties of JWT profile fields into Cloud CMS. While logging in again, the system will check whether the JWT token is found and is valid. It can also be redirected to a remote login. Visit the documentation for more information.

Any questions?

Lets face it – CMS editors just want to do their job and not spend too long in the tools.

Recently we added a feature to allow Content editors to do image cropping within the Cloud CMS User Interface rather than having to do this outside Cloud CMS and re-upload the image. This is a simple powerful feature which will save the content editor many clicks and minutes.

The image editing tool allows for:

reversing an image, and rotating an image

cropping the image

saving and reverting back to the original

Try this feature out yourself:

If you haven’t already done so register for a Cloud CMS Trial. Included in the Cloud CMS Trial there is a sample site where you can manipulate images. For example:

go to Sample Project

click Content (left Nav) – this may take a couple of seconds for the content to appear

click on Dean Martin

click Editor (left Nav) 

Now you can experiment with the editor features.

Further enhancements

There will be an update to the image editing tool in the coming weeks which will have the following additional functionality:

shows pixel sizes

resize image

Templates for common set of crops for commonly used sizes

Any questions?

You have determined you need a Content Management System (CMS) and have begun the daunting task of reducing the number of CMS products to a manageable number to evaluate in depth.

Having reached this article you are aware of, or interested in, CMSs that can be described as: Headless CMS, API First, Platform as a Service (PaaS), Decoupled CMS, Cloud-First. I am sure there are more beautiful categorizations and terminology provided by the latest analyst buzz. As much as I may not like the catagorizations, they are useful in that without them what would you search for?

But as you will have discovered, there are a number of CMS products catagorized as Headless CMS, or API First, etc. Cloud CMS is just one of many products you will find with a simple search. How to evaluate further: features, cost, trial, openness of information? It is still difficult to compare products.

At Cloud CMS we believe we have the best product as I am sure all our competitors believe in their products. To an extent we are all telling the truth and it really depends what criteria or features are important to you.

Top 3 Features that differentiate Cloud CMS

To help you evaluate further: here are the top 3 features of Cloud CMS that differentiates Cloud CMS from the competition:

1. Cloud CMS is available both On-Premise and SaaS

We are a Cloud based company embracing the SaaS model. We love the SaaS model. What has changed - in a word "Docker". Docker containers have allowed us to distribute the Cloud CMS product easily for On-Premise/Private Cloud installation. Whilst SaaS may offer many benefits, On-Premise is still a desirable option for some companies for the following reasons:

Regional restrictions: ie the content must reside in a particular region. This may be legal or a business restriction.

Internal Security. Some organization have security restrictions/policies that either don’t allow applications/content to be hosted externally or the getting through the security procedures make it quicker and easier to go for on-premise options

Control: A benefit of SaaS is that updates and bug fixes occur ‘continuously’. Usually the whole process is transparent to the customer. For some organizations and application the constant change is not acceptable. A change could introduce a change of behavior in the application which could adversely affect users. Hence, on-premise can stabilize a release and allow the customer to control the release cycle for their users.

White label / customization

MicroService: With your own on-premise installation you can scale and fine tune the Cloud CMS components. Not least, reducing network latency by hosting close to your applications and users.

2. Cloud CMS is a headless CMS with powerful ECM features

Some of the basic functions of creating and managing content that you rightfully expect to be in Content management systems are surprisingly not always there – check! Our background is in Enterprise content management systems so we have designed Cloud CMS to include these features for all our offerings:

Workflow

Versioning and audit

Branches / Workspaces

Content model

Roles / groups / teams

And many more (honestly – take a look)

3. Architecture

This is the CMS your architects would build if they had the time and resources (and were in the CMS business). Cloud CMS runs on top of MongoDB, ElasticSearch and Amazon AWS.

Good luck with your CMS evaluation

ROI and Content Management Systems (CMS) are rarely used in the same sentence due to the uncomfortable pricing models from all legacy CMS vendors - as well as the spiraling costs of implementing them. Often so much investment has been made in the CMS that changing is not a realistic consideration.

This negativity only increases when you start using the term Enterprise Content Management (ECM), where suddenly vendors start seeing dollar signs, but offer no additional functionality e.g., Alfresco, Documentum, Adobe CQ5, and many more. Rather, creative “Per User” or "Per CPU" pricing makes selling to the Enterprise very attractive to vendors.

At Cloud CMS we strive to provide exceptional value with a CMS which will meet your current and future needs. The benefits of the Cloud CMS approach can be realized in many ways but occasionally you need to have a “SHOW ME THE MONEY!” conversation.

Some potential ways to realize your ROI with Cloud CMS:

Freedom

We adhere to an API First, or “headless” approach to content management. This means all content and CMS functionality is available via our 1,300+ APIs. Every UI, including our packaged console, uses these APIs. Create and manage content thru our console, and call the APIs to access any content on your frontend applications. This provides greater freedom rather than being limited to a CMS vendor’s templating options.

Future Proofing

Reuse: Through the separation of the CMS and the presentation layer you can create amazing websites and application with the frontend technology of your choice. Whenever you need to refresh or redesign the presentation layer, the CMS and content can be reused in-place. Minimizing the changes and maximizing reuse is huge benefit to any project from the technical, marketing, and business perspectives.

Multi-channel/Device: three possibilities for cost savings:

One CMS, creating content which can be deployed anywhere as needed

What are your future device and application requirements? What devices are coming up in the next 6 months+? The frontend costs are maybe unknown but you can limit the risk and costs by using a CMS that provide the Content via APIs. No change to the CMS

Reduce Time To Market: having the content available in a Headless CMS allows for an organisation to respond to changes and the requirements for new devices and channels.

Software as a Service

SaaS CMS services can convert expensive capital outlay for servers and network equipment into a monthly operating expense, while also reducing the IT resources required to manage enterprise records. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_content_management

Scalable: Cloud CMS scales seamlessly to meet your needs. Again, no upfront costs.

Always on latest version: Cloud CMS continues to grow with new and enhanced features, performance, bug resolution. No need to wait and plan large upgrade projects.

Feature rich

Cloud CMS is a lot more than a well architected repository and API. Jeff Potts summarized this nicely in his blog Content-as-a-Service Review: Cloud CMS: “..Cloud CMS is an extensible platform with a long list of features. This is more than just a place to stick content and an API to get it back out–this is a full-featured CMS that happens to be running as SaaS in the cloud. ..”

Flexibility - Fits with your infrastructure

Application development and delivery teams at publishing organizations, media companies, and branded manufacturers already use API First CMS tools alongside multiple other sets of API-first micro-services to build out new digital products.

Flexible Deployment Options (https://www.cloudcms.com/developers.html ): whether SaaS or On-Premise, direct API, custom Application server, or using our NodeJS module.

At Cloud CMS we have a straight forward honest approach. We care about what we do and how we do it. We are essentially engineers that want to create the “right” solutions and see our customers get value from their CMS. Needless to say we are proud of what we deliver.