Here are some of the questions we often get asked by customers evaluating Brightspot as their CMS solution. Don't see an answer to your specific question? Talk to us today—we will be happy to discuss your specific use case!
No! While you certainly can use them—be it for inspiration, to drive requirements with your business stakeholders or as a starting point to get to launch quickly—you can also create your own content types directly in the Brightspot UI. As your content types are created, APIs are also automatically generated for you, as is the CMS UI.
No, you can use any front end you’d like, whether that’s a React FE, simple HTML, CSS and JavaScript, or hanging on to your newly launched look-and-feel.
That's a yes. Our pre-built front ends are available for our customers to use, extend and customize for their digital experiences. We love seeing what our customers come up with based on our toolkits.
With Brightspot, you can customize however you’d like. You can likely get most of the way there with our theme editor and no-code, in-CMS customization tools. To go further, you can add CSS within Brightspot, giving you a low-code option to customize your front end(s). If you have developers and choose to, you can also create a professional software project and edit the entire front-end bundle of JavaScript, CSS and Handlebars templates to take your customization as far as you’d like to go. Let us show you how!
Brightspot includes dozens of integrations to handle most common use cases. We are constantly adding new integrations to the Brightspot library—if we don’t have it today, we may have it tomorrow. Generally speaking, if a system provides an API then we are able to integrate with it. You can also talk to an expert about building new integrations.
No! In fact, Brightspot can be used as a headless, decoupled or hybrid CMS—all from the same infrastructure. You can mix and match the approach that makes sense for your needs; one experience might be fully headless, another might be decoupled. You can run both, and share content between them, all from the same CMS instance.
Yes, absolutely. Our content type editor lets you easily create any content types that your business needs, and our GraphQL and RESTful content delivery and management APIs and webhooks make it easy to connect to Brightspot from front-end experiences built in whatever language, framework or environment you prefer.
We're so glad you asked! Brightspot's flexible, front-end agnostic approach to content management is unique—and puts us well ahead of our competitors when it comes customers looking to avoid lock-in. Plus, we’re pretty chuffed about our CMS UI—as well as our industry-leading authoring, workflow and collaboration tools.
Simply put, as many as you need. Typically, users of the Brightspot SaaS CMS only require a single production environment for publishing activities. We are happy to talk to you around specific needs for different use cases around CMS migrations, development testing and more.
It sure does, and we consider one of the many significant benefits of our offering. Your Brightspot license includes hosting on one of the world’s most comprehensive and widely used cloud platforms, up to 5T of monthly bandwidth and storage at no additional cost and 24x7 monitoring and security.
Brightspot supports GraphQL and RESTful content delivery and management APIs and webhooks to make it easy to connect to Brightspot from front-end experiences built in whatever language, framework or environment you prefer.
Brightspot offers two types of configurable GraphQL APIs. They are the Content Management and Content Delivery APIs, commonly abbreviated as CMA and CDA, respectively. With some very light configuration, GraphQL schemas and APIs are automatically generated and updated with each change to relevant data models and business logic.
Visit our developer documentation for more information:
Using Brightspot, you can create webhooks in two ways. The first way is the standard way you create a webhook—through configuring APIs; however, Brightspot also allows webhooks to be easily created via its editorial UI.
In the image above, the user is able to simply navigate to a section within Brightspot CMS, select REST Management API from a dropdown list, and then see an interface with all necessary elements laid cleanly out for them.
After entering a name for the API and defining the API's URL (not the same as the webhook's URL—a conversation for another day), the user can click "Add Webhook," which pops open a content edit form where they can define the URL to which metadata is sent as well as what event triggers the webhook.
Topics are the events discussed above. Many of these come out-of-the-box with Brightspot: Publish, Conversation, Translation, Workflow—and quite a few more than those. Depending on which topic the user chooses to "listen" to, the UI morphs to add deeper configuration functionality.
From those examples alone, outside apps can receive notifications when something is published, when a comment is made in the conversation widget, when a translation has transitioned to any number of states, or when an asset progresses through a workflow.
All of this is highly actionable information for an editor.
Content filters allow a user to dig down with even greater granularity as to which specific event triggers a notification. Maybe the user only wants the webhook for a particular site in their multisite environment, or maybe only for the notification to trigger the first time a specific event occurs.
All possible.
As software-as-a-service platforms continue to enjoy widespread popularity across the internet, webhooks remain a valuable way to get these platforms to communicate, and more importantly, ensure the users of these platforms are well aware of relevant changes the moment they are made. And with Brightspot, you get the tools to make webhooks however you prefer to do so.
Brightspot gives editors even more flexibility than before by enabling them to create their own content types in just a few mouse clicks. The video below shows how easy it is done.
Developers can leverage JavaScript to extend and modify content types, as well as the Brightspot CMS UI, using a feature called JavaScript Classes.
JavaScript Classes allows developers to customize the CMS UI; for example, by creating a brand-new right rail widget that invokes an action or connection to another third-party system. JavaScript Classes can also be used to build support for new integrations, to add custom business logic to content types, and also to create view models.
Leveraging JavaScript Classes enables engineers to customize Brightspot exclusively through the CMS UI—eliminating the need to write, commit and deploy code using Java, and saving valuable time.
With Brightspot, you can customize your front end however you’d like. You can likely get most of the way there with our theme editor and no-code, in-CMS customization tools. To go further, you can add CSS within Brightspot, giving you a low-code option to customize your front end(s). If you have developers and choose to, you can also create a professional software project and edit the entire front-end bundle of JavaScript, CSS and Handlebars templates to take your customization as far as you’d like to go.
Yes. Brightspot is designed to be front-end agnostic, meaning you can work in whatever front-end framework your team with which your team is most comfortable.
Nope! While Brightspot’s underlying architecture leverages Java, Apache, MySQL and Solr, you can also use JavaScript to extend the CMS UI, to create new widgets, as well as to add custom business logic to your content types.
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