A platform that delivers the ultimate flexibility

Put the perfect solution directly into the hands of your developers. Brightspot supports modern best practices and standards to support any integration, any workflow and any front-end approach. You can quickly and easily build exactly what you want using the latest, cutting-edge capabilities within the platform.

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The world's top brands have chosen Brightspot

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Brightspot CMS Extensible Architecture
Focus on your business logic
Choose from a relatively hands-off solution, which builds APIs with some simple configuration. Or if you prefer, take the advanced road and your team can customize APIs to a significantly more granular level, all via data modeling.

Brightspot automatically generates APIs based on your data models so you never have to worry about the boilerplate and domain knowledge necessary for building an endpoint from scratch again.

Take control of your platform

Brightspot improved the quality of life for our editorial team, who can now manage sites, collaborate and publish experiences faster and more seamlessly than ever to meet the demands of our audience. It also empowered our development team, giving them total control over the look and feel of our platform.
Director of Technology
Brightspot CMS case study: Televisa

The roadblocks are removed

Get more done, faster, by taking advantage of Brightspot’s extensible platform, which is rich with debugging tools, APIs and more. Plus, get the support you need on day one to launch quickly and maintain with ease.
Use cutting-edge capabilities
Iterate rapidly and quickly spin up models for any use case using the unique data framework. This means you can spend your time defining the underlying architecture and business logic, not on tedious remodeling efforts.
Prepped for customization and innovation
Enjoy the freedom to evolve the platform as you need with a framework that's designed to extend and support myriad use cases. Not only can you build your own domain model and site, but you can also heavily customize the CMS itself.
The APIs are ready
REST and GraphQL APIs, including APIs for managing data (Content Management APIs) and for delivering data to the front end (Content Delivery APIs), are already built into the platform.
Robust debugging tools are built-in
Troubleshoot issues and improve performance with debugging tools that allow you to access the data directly in SQL or any database you’re using, or use the interface to query data using the syntax that you would use with the DAL APIs.
The front end is there
Fully power your front end in less time using a theme bundle that's been preconfigured to work with the Brightspot Content Delivery APIs. Or you can customize to your exact liking.

Extend your tech stack effortlessly

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Advertising
Monetize content and pages within your website or app
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Analytics
Collect and view site performance data and gain actionable insights
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AI & machine learning
Enhance content creation and delivery with AI and machine-learning tools
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Content syndication
Distribute content quickly via the world’s biggest social-media platforms
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E-commerce
Use storytelling to increase your revenue through a commerce-as-content approach
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Marketing
Reach the right digital audiences through an integrated martech stack
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Media libraries
Easily search for assets via external sources directly from the CMS
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Paywalls & payments
Manage your eCommerce payments, digital access and subscriptions
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Social
Embed posts from all of your social networks directly in pages
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Translations
Reach global audiences through machine and human translation services
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Video
Multimedia publishing via the most popular online video providers

Development will be frictionless

Go headless to power an API-first design, or use our front-end framework—or do both and make the most of an incredibly flexible architecture.
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Agility
Back-end and front-end developers can work concurrently with a decoupled or headless implementation.
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Flexibility
Mix and match your front-end content offerings to deliver the best user experience across every device.
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Resiliency
Future-proof your business by making it easy to evolve continuously alongside new technologies.
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Reusability
Reduce the amount of custom code you write for each specific implementation with a modular approach.
Collaborate, innovate and excel with Brightspot customers and partners around the world to create innovative digital experiences.

Visit the Brightspot Developer Portal

More resources for you

Browse our library of resources for unlocking the full potential of Brightspot, from developer tools and guides to insights for using our headless APIs.
Start here with documentation for your Brightspot headless CMS integration.
Get access to your Dari data models backed by the Java classes that define them.
The best way to use Brightspot as a headless CMS to power your custom front end.
GraphQL supports the Content Delivery and Content Management APIs for headless CMS.

Technical FAQs

What APIs does Brightspot support?

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:

Do you support webhooks?

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.

webhook screenshot

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.
webhook screenshot
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.

How do I create my own content types?

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.

Visit our developer documentation for more information on creating new editorial content types.

Brightspot CMS Editorial Content Types screenshot
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Inside Brightspot: Editorial content types

How do I modify and/or extend Brightspot content types?

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.

Visit our Brightspot documentation portal for more detailed information on adding custom styling and scripting to Brightspot.

How do I customize or create my own front-end theme and/or style guide?

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.

Brightspot Styleguide
Brightspot Styleguide

Visit our developer documentation for more detailed information on managing, customizing and extending themes.

Can we use React (or next.js or Angular or something else)?

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.

Do I have to know Java?

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.

Let us give you a demo

Hear how Brightspot can turn your digital strategy goals into a reality and see how the lives of your content creators and developers will be changed using our platform.

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