As a technical leader, you’re in charge of finding the right CMS for your organization, but it’s never quite a “one size fits all.” You’ll always need to make adjustments to the platform to match your specific requirements, and that isn’t always easy for some platforms.
The Brightspot CMS was designed with an extensible architecture which naturally enables you to add your business logic and workflow. Companies today serve an ever dynamic audience with intense competitive pressure to go to market faster and create authentic experiences with their customers. That means they need technology that’s flexible and built to scale.
Brightspot default data models
Brightspot comes with a number of different content types out-of-the-box to help customers quickly migrate or replatform to the Brightspot CMS.
With default data models for content types like Articles, Blog Posts, Pages, Blog Posts, Galleries, Videos—and many more—our customers have immediate access to the tools they need to best present their content to online audiences.
Creating data models
Sometimes, this won’t be enough, however. What if there are content types you need that don’t yet exist in Brightspot’s data model? An engineer (on our side or your side—whatever best works for you) can create the content type and its underlying data model, and then you’ll have what you need.
Extending data models
Let’s say that we have almost exactly what you need, though. If that’s the case, we can simply extend pre-existing content types to better meet individual needs and requirements.
Any content type can be re-modeled for any purpose you may need. We can handle this process on our end after discussions with your team about your requirements, but if you feel more comfortable handing the data modeling yourself, no problem—you have that freedom, too.
Adding or Removing Fields
Let’s take the Article content type. Each Article, by default, comes with a Headline, Subheadline, Slug, Author(s), etc. For your purposes, you may want an extra field.
Once our Delivery Team understands your requirements, they can write the necessary code to include this field along with the other content offerings that come out-of-the-box with Article. Or, as mentioned above, your developers can handle it either by themselves or in tandem with ours—whatever works best.
Let’s take a look at what this looks like in the code. Below is a screenshot where the Author field has been added to the Blog content type.
Now that the Author field has been added, it appears toward the bottom of the interface. Let’s move it higher.
Now, let’s take a look at how the field appears in Brightspot.
Removing fields from our standard data models is even easier using Content Forms.
Content Forms allow you to control the UI of an asset, like:
- The order of fields on the content type
- The labels of fields on the content type
- Whether a field is editable or is read-only on the content type
- Whether a field is displayed or is hidden on the content type
You have choices with Content Forms as far as "where you want them to appear." With Content Forms, you have two choices:
- Global: The changes you make to a content type in your Content Form become the default for all CMS users.
- By Role: The Content Form you create must then be associated with a given Role.
So whatever data model you need, Brightspot has you covered. A new content type can be created in its entirety, or we can simply extend an existing one. And since Brightspot was designed to be so extendible, you’ll enjoy a smooth process getting to that point.
