Overview of CMS (SaaS)

Optimizely Content Management System (SaaS) is a Content Management System (CMS) service that is fully managed by Optimizely. It includes first-class technology-agnostic REST and GraphQL APIs, which offer an easy process for building headless solutions.

You cannot modify the service using code deployment as you can with a traditional CMS, which means Optimizely can continuously improve the CMS (SaaS) service. By consuming content from the CMS, you can focus on delivering business value on the front end.

CMS (SaaS) is a headless CMS service that provides the infrastructure to create and manage content, letting front-end applications run fully decoupled from the service and be written on any platform you choose. Content is delivered using Optimizely Graph. For information, see the Optimizely Graph developer guide.

Content model

Content is at the heart of CMS (SaaS). Before building your application, you should consider how you want to model your content. Your content can be any type, including webpages, components, and media, and can be shared on multiple platforms. It is important to model your content in a platform-agnostic way.

Before creating content, you must create Content types. Content types describe a content item's characteristics and data model schema. In other words, content holds data in a structured way described by a schema defined by a content type. Every content item is an instance of a content type. See Create a content type for instructions.

After creating content types, you can use them to create content. After creating content, you can use Optimizely Graph to retrieve it.

Get started

First, follow the Content Management System (SaaS) end-user documentation for information on the user interface and editing information.

After familiarizing yourself with the UI and understanding how content is modeled in CMS (SaaS), you can:

• Follow the Get started guide to learn how to create content in CMS (SaaS) and retrieve it using Optimizely Graph.
• Use the Visual Builder to create content and build adaptable layouts of experiences for any channel.
• Follow a walkthrough to create a demo site and import pre-defined content:
  • Create a demo site using CMS (SaaS) and Vercel.
    • How to use Visual Builder in CMS (SaaS).
    • Mosey Bank sample site (beta only).

Import data from CMS

You can import content from a traditional CMS site to CMS (SaaS) using the standard Import or Export functionality. There are several key limitations and considerations to consider when importing into CMS (SaaS). See Export and import packages.

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Important

Any data that relies on customizations may not transfer as expected.

You can export content from CMS (SaaS) to be imported into an Optimizely CMS site. However, CMS (SaaS)'s import and export feature only includes published content, not draft versions or any version history.