Content Management Systems (CMS) come in many forms. At its most basic, you may be looking at a simple text field or a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. These can be powerful enough in the right hands but still require a web developer if you want anything more than a basic layout. On the more advanced end of the CMS spectrum, you’ll find predefined components with drag-and-drop functionality, providing the layman with the ability to make new pages with interesting layouts.
We’re going to take a look at the CMS that comes with the Workarea platform; a trusted solution and commerce platform partner of CQL. Workarea’s CMS strikes a great balance between being intuitive for marketers and effortless for your developers to update and provide new tooling. Overall, this CMS will make life easier for your business and both sides of your team.
Using the Workarea CMS as a Marketer
Workarea’s CMS provides very powerful tools for marketers. Whether you’re editing content for your website, creating content for predefined sections, or creating/editing a full page, you’ll have full control of the page metadata for SEO purposes along the way.
The platform simplifies the management and creation of content with easy-to-use content blocks. With a variety of different types of content blocks available right out of the box, the platform will only grow as it matures. Whether you want to add a large banner or create a list of product tiles, it only takes a few clicks. Below, I’ll outline some ways you can use these blocks to build pages, as a marketer, with ease.
First, you need to select what type of content you wish to use.
After selecting what type of content you’d like to add, you will see a few configurable fields based on the block you’ve chosen. These fields could be simple text inputs for adding a title or button, a file browser for adding images, or even raw HTML input for advanced users.
Once you’ve configured the content blocks for your page, you can move them or rearrange them with some quick drag-and-drops.
As you can see, the CMS’ content block builder is intuitive and makes it easy for marketers to build and manage pages with fresh and optimized content.
Changing the CMS as a Developer
If you have specific needs for a page layout, Workarea provides a well-documented path for your SI (System Integrator) to create new and reusable content blocks that integrate seamlessly into your website.
Developers can define the reusable blocks using a straight-forward content block DSL along with partial templates. You will also want to add block-specific CSS and Javascript to enrich the experience of the new block.
Workarea provides several Rails generators to make life easy and content blocks are no exception, giving you a single command to get a boilerplate up and running for your new content blocks. Running “rails g workarea:content_block_type <name>” should give you everything you need to get started.
While the finer points of the implementation are outside the scope of this post, developers who wish to learn more about it can find more information on adding content blocks to Workarea pages, here.
Developers also have full access to the platform source code. While you wouldn’t want to change the source code directly, the platform uses a decorator pattern that makes changing and extending the core platform behavior easy.
Empowering Your Team
As an Ecommerce Developer at CQL, I find the Workarea CMS one of the easiest platforms of its kind to use. It provides an intuitive experience for marketers and a well-documented development path for programmers. Through this CMS, your team will work together to serve rich and dynamic content to your users in no time.
Want to know more about the Workarea platform and CMS solution? Contact our talented development team today.
