Brightspot Partner Program: Frequently asked questions

Brightspot offers a robust, enterprise-ready CMS that's fully built out and battle-tested against dozens of different use cases and complex digital-publishing scenarios. With Brightspot as your CMS platform, you and your customers can be assured of a world-class publishing experience that delivers many of its most powerful features out-of-the-box—from pre-built content types to dozens of integrations—and ready for business from day one.

Click here to learn more about the benefits of joining the Brightspot Partner Program

Brightspot doesn’t make you choose between divergent CMS architecture options.

Legacy CMS platforms like WordPress and WordPress VIP, provide organizations with pre-built front-end themes that allow them to launch sites quickly and without involving developers. But these solutions provide little or no flexibility in terms of customization (other than paying an agency or integrator thousands of dollars each time you want to change something).

Meanwhile, headless CMS offerings like Contentful, which promise unlimited flexibility to dev teams to create front-end experiences in any language, framework or environment they prefer, but offer absolutely nothing out-of-the-box with which publishing teams can get started, thus requiring time-consuming and complex front-end build cycles before a site or app can be launched.

One of the core values of Brightspot is that it eliminates the need to make this choice at all. With Brightspot, an organization can use pre-built content types and editorially customizable front-end themes to launch new experiences with astonishing speed while not impacting developers. Or it can choose to go headless—or do both at the same time with our hybrid-headless flexibility—taking advantage of the approach that best suits the project rather than being forced to make a choice that involves dependencies across an entire organization.

We work with our partners throughout the sales, development, implementation and production cycle. This includes opportunities for co-selling and co-marketing, training and onboarding, as well as full-service platform support and maintenance.

Brightspot global partners comprise digital agencies, integrators and software-development companies servicing organizations across industries and verticals. Contact us today to learn more about joining our partner community.

Brightspot partners have access to a dedicated partner portal with onboarding materials, how-to guides, documentation, on-demand webinars and more. We also offer live (virtual) and in-person training sessions. Partners invited to become a Brightspot Implementation Partner will participate in an Onboarding Program designed to get the partner’s team ready to develop and implement customer projects.

Yes, we will provide your team with dedicated development environments to stand up, develop and test your CMS implementation(s) before deploying to production.

Our pricing model varies on the scope and complexity of each project, including levels of customization, custom integrations and delivery support. Our initial Brightspot offering is an enterprise-grade solution at a lower price point that lets companies launch fast and start publishing immediately. Talk with us today to discuss your unique requirements and find out what solution fits best!

Customers are moving away from monolithic CMS platforms as content teams support building out digital experiences across multiple digital channels. Brightspot provides one of the most powerful authoring and editing content hub for end users, providing partners freedom and  flexibility in how to structure content.

Developers embrace Brightspot because we bring the focus back to business logic. Brightspot offers a relatively hands-off solution that builds generally useful APIs with some simple configuration but also an advanced solution where developers can customize their APIs to a significantly granular level, all via data modeling.

Yes, our team is happy to partner with you on the RFP process to understand pricing, technical implementation details, customizations, timelines and more as it relates to your sales pipeline.

The CMS back-end 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. The front-end utilizes JavaScript Handlebars, but is designed to be front-end agnostic, meaning you can work in whatever front-end framework with which your team is most comfortable.

We have a developer certification program to help either your front-end, back-end or full-stack developers to start developing on Brightspot. We also provide multiple architectural reviews of your project implementations to ensure the successful delivery of your Brightspot project for your customers. Lastly, our partner support portal is staffed by our delivery engineering team to help answer any developer and editorial questions.

By using Brightspot, you can get your customers up and running in less than 60 days. More complex projects including additional custom integrations, development of new templates and CMS-type customization will take longer.

Our team has deep experience with content-migration process across projects of varying sizes and scale of complexity. The Brightspot platform is built on the principle of extensibility, including the ability to build out the required data and content models to facilitate the migration of content of all different kinds into the CMS.

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.

No! 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.

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.

On the back end, Brightspot leverages Java, Apache, MySQL and Solr, but 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. Brightspot is designed to be front-end agnostic, meaning you can work in whatever front-end framework with which your team is most comfortable. Choose a theme or bring your own front end built with React, Angular, Vue.js or in whatever language you choose. This front-end freedom of choice is what, we think, sets us apart. Talk to our engineeering team today to learn more!

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!

Yes! Our partners' portal includes training tutorials and documentation to get you started. Or we'd be happy to set up live training sessions to ensure your front-end teams are equipped for success.

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.

Yes. Brightspot is designed to be front-end agnostic, meaning you can work in whatever front-end framework with which your team is most comfortable.

Brightspot offers dozens of out of-the-box integrations to handle most common use cases. Along with a number of additional custom integrations, 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.

"Brightspot" is the name of our company, as well as the name of our platform, upon which we have built the Brightspot CMS as well as complimentary products like Brightspot Assignment Desk and Brightspot Media Desk. "Brightspot" also incorporates our Delivery organization, which builds world-class digital experiences and custom CMS extensions and integrations for our customers. Our product, Brightspot, includes the SaaS version of our enterprise CMS—designed to dramatically accelerate the launch and management of enterprise digital projects as well as substantially reducing the dependency on development resources required to accomplish them.

Absolutely, yes, developers can leverage JavaScript to extend and modify content types, as well as the Brightspot CMS UI, using a feature called JavaScript Classes. As your content types are created, APIs are also automatically generated for you, as is the CMS UI.

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.

Please visit the Brightspot documentation for access to our library of front- and back-end CMS guides.

• Brightspot CMS User Guide: Learn how to creating and managing content with Brightspot
• Developer Guide: Documentation for installing, supporting and administering Brightspot

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:

• GraphQL API
• Content Management API
• Content Delivery API

Brightspot is deployed in a virtual private cloud operated in the public cloud. Typical implementations include a production environment (which is deployed in a high-availability manner and scales to accommodate fluctuations in demand) and one or two non-production environments. Data and configurations are not shared among these environments.

The customer retains all ownership of content stored in Brightspot’s systems; Brightspot does not repurpose, sell, aggregate, distribute, or otherwise make use of customers' content.

Brightspot uses industry best practices to protect our customers information—practices including encryption of data in motion and at rest, leveraging multi-factor authentication and principle of least privilege for systems access, conducting background checks prior to employment and ongoing security training for all employees, and many others. The Brightspot CMS supports our customers’ policies and practices as well, with granular user and role permissions, support for multi-factor authentication and external identity management products, and auditability of changes made in the CMS.