Overview of CMS 13

Optimizely CMS 13 is a cloud-first content management system built around headless delivery, visual authoring, and deep integration with the Optimizely One ecosystem. Learn about mandatory components, search implementation options, and how to get started.

Optimizely CMS 13 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 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 to benefit from the full suite of features CMS 13 offers. Opti ID and 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 manages only users of Optimizely products. Opti ID supports enterprise identity management needs in many ways, including multi-factor authentication (MFA) and system for cross-domain identity management (SCIM) provisioning. Read more about Opti ID benefits.

Opti ID enables CMS 13 to leverage the following integrations:

Optimizely Digital Asset Manager (DAM) – Access and manage your DAM instance directly within CMS 13.
Optimizely Opal – A generative AI agent orchestration platform with system tools for CMS and Graph as well as pre-built agents to help you work smarter across the Optimizely One ecosystem.

See Configure Opti ID for CMS 13 to get started.

Optimizely Graph (mandatory)

Optimizely Graph replaces the legacy content indexing, preview, and delivery pipeline. Graph also expands Optimizely Opal capabilities by using tools to share indexed CMS 13 content and context. See Why upgrade to CMS 13? to understand the value Graph brings to CMS 13.

Graph enables CMS 13 to leverage the following integrations and features:

Optimizely Opal – Leverage Graph tools within Optimizely Opal to retrieve and search for content.
Add images from DAM – Access and insert images from your DAM instance directly within CMS 13.
Content Manager – Easily locate content that is organized in a hierarchical table structure, with filter, search, and sort functionality.
Content binding – Uses Graph structured queries to connect content items to external data sources or other content items. It enables automatic synchronization and structured relationships between content items.

First, you must Enable Graph service to sync DAM and CMS .

To configure Graph for CMS 13, learn how to Get started with Optimizely Graph for CMS 13.

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. See Get started with Optimizely Graph for CMS 13.
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, see Migrate from Search & Navigation to Optimizely Graph.

Dive into CMS 13

Review these articles when planning your implementation or upgrade of CMS 13 to understand the mandatory and optional components of CMS 13. You should consider the optimal order of implementation while considering the timelines needed for each component in your go-live planning.

Updated about 3 hours ago