Overview of CMS 13 pre release

Optimizely CMS 13 pre-release introduces a modern, cloud-first content management experience with a strong focus on headless delivery, visual authoring, and deep integration with Optimizely Graph.

CMS 13 strategically shifts how it indexes, queries, previews, and delivers content across Optimizely products. As a result, Optimizely designed CMS 13 pre-release to work as part of a broader Optimizely platform experience instead of a standalone system.

Mandatory components for CMS 13

Optimizely Graph and Opti ID are mandatory components are are included in your CMS 13 license. Opti ID and Optimizely Graph enable CMS 13 to leverage cross-product functionality within the Optimizely One ecosystem and opens up composability with third-party add-ons, futureproofing your CMS 13 implementation for upcoming features

Opti ID (mandatory)

Opti ID is the single sign-on (SSO) solution for Optimizely products that lets you access all available Optimizely products with a single login point. Opti ID replaces per-product login and enables CMS 13 customers to use Optimizely Opal, an agent orchestration platform that helps you work smarter across Optimizely One. Opti ID manages only users of Optimizely products and does not manage visitor logins for your frontend site.

Optimizely Graph (mandatory)

Optimizely Graph replaces the legacy content indexing, preview, and delivery pipeline. Graph also expands Optimizely Opal capabilities by sharing indexed CMS 13 content and context. For a full list of CMS 13 pre-release and upcoming features dependent on Graph, see Essential Graph functionality. To configure Graph for CMS 13, see Implement Optimizely Graph.

Search implementation for CMS 13

CMS 13 introduces important changes to search implementation options.

Supported search options

Optimizely Graph – Optional content search implementation that lets you create custom search tools to transform user input into a GraphQL query, and then process the results into a search results page.
Third-party search provider – Leverage CMS 13's composability by bringing your own search provider of choice.

Deprecated search support

CMS 13 and future releases will no longer support Search & Navigation implementations. You should implement search with Graph or a third-party search provider. If you have CMS 12 or older and are upgrading to CMS 13, more information on migrating Search & Navigation to Graph will be provided closer to the general availability release date for CMS 13.

What is included in the CMS 13 pre-release

The CMS 13 pre-release includes the following functional areas:

Content management and editing – Encompasses Content Manager and Visual Builder, which include functionality such as improved search, customizable columns, grid page, in-context editing, and drag-and-drop image uploads.

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Note: Visual Builder is not dependent on Optimizely Graph. It fully supports in-process ASP.NET applications.

Optimizely Graph – Capitalize Optimizely Graph for content indexing, querying, external content integration, and optimized sync.
Multilingual capabilities – Improvements in multi-language content translation, global language context switching, and fallback language configurations.
Preview and publishing – Features like real-time content variation previews, custom preview routing for headless websites, and scheduled publish dates.
Developer experience – Updates to .NET SDK, and tools for defining custom elements and element types.
Performance and reliability – Optimizations for full sync to Optimizely Graph, media content extraction, and enhanced indexing process reporting.

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Note
NOT in the CMS 13 Pre-release lists excluded features.

Dive into CMS 13 pre-release

Get Started with CMS 13 pre-release – Learn the key considerations for a fresh implementation of CMS 13.
Upgrade CMS 12 to CMS 13 pre-release – Step through migrating a CMS 12 Alloy starter site to CMS 13 and understand the upgrade considerations.