Go headless to power an API-first design, or use Brightspot CMS's front-end framework—or do both and empower your developers with a CMS with an incredibly flexible architecture.
Learn how to avoid the content management marketing hype by matching your technology choice to your specific context in this study, commissioned by Brightspot from Forrester Consulting.
Brightspot's extensible architecture is designed to be flexible and fast—with built-in debugging tools, APIs and more, all designed to save development teams time and money.
Brightspot's Dari type system handles in-memory representation of any data type used in Brightspot. This data is typically derived from Java classes but can be from other sources.
CMS APIs
Brightspot offers a wide array of APIs, including APIs for managing data (Content Management APIs) and for delivering data to the front end (Content Delivery APIs).
Debugging tools
While developers can access the data directly in SQL or whatever database they're using, we also provide an interface where they can query the data using the syntax that they'd use with the DAL APIs.
Brightspot Styleguide
Styleguide is a Node.js application that's been preconfigured to work with the Brightspot Content Delivery APIs. It can be run independently from Brightspot, and builds a theme bundle that can be uploaded to Brightspot to fully power the front end.
Integration ready: Extend your tech stack effortlessly
Save time and dev resources with Brightspot’s 50+ plug-and-play integrations, which make it easy to connect your tech stack into a central hub.
Remove developer roadblocks
Give your developers ultimate flexibility with Brightspot’s extensible architecture. Focus on your underlying business logic, not on tedious database remodeling efforts or custom code.
Flexible
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.
Secure
Troubleshoot issues and improve performance with robust debugging tools that allow you to access data directly in SQL or any other database.
Agile
Evolve the platform as you need. You can build your own domain model and site, and even customize the CMS itself, so you can work the way your business needs.
"Sticking with a legacy CMS would have constrained our creativity and undermined our confidence. With a modern CMS like Brightspot, we can move and innovate the way we want now, and in the future." - Senior Manager, Digital Strategy
"For us, Brightspot offers a lot of benefits. We are really excited to be able to pair the out-of-the-box features that come with the upgraded version of Brightspot with our custom development to be able to provide a sleek, modern CMS for our evolving newsroom." - Senior Project Manager, POLITICO
"We originally partnered with Brightspot to implement an enterprise CMS that delivered high-quality user experience, which was a success. Now, years later, Brightspot is still ensuring our digital properties embody vivid images, powerful search and compelling stories and that our editorial content integrates with our auction engine to provide a seamless experience for our users." - Vice President, Platform and Application Strategy
"It's been four years since the initial implementation, and our editorial staff continues to be very happy with the platform. U.S. News anticipates using Brightspot for many years to come." - Senior Vice President of Technology, U.S. News & World Report
"It's a Ferrari of a system. Brightspot has an incredibly fast, sleek front end, and the back end is intuitive, simple and effective. Basically, it helps us publish faster." - Director of Multimedia, National Geographic
"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, Televisa Digital
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.
It's a Ferrari of a system. Brightspot has an incredibly fast, sleek front end, and the back end is intuitive, simple and effective. Basically, it helps us publish faster.
Director of Multimedia
See Brightspot in action
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.
