Introducing Content Graph

Optimizely Content Graph turns your Optimizely Content Management System (CMS) content into a graph. Similar to how a search engines crawls the web to build a graph-based index of content, Content Graph transforms your CMS content into a form you can query. You can search and manipulate content using the GraphQL standard.

Content Graph is an Optimizely Digital Experience Platform (DXP) Cloud service. You can provision it from within the PaaS portal. Once activated, you can install and deploy the required CMS package for your site. With the synchronization package installed, configure triggers and scheduling options that determine when the package will synchronize content between your site and the Content Graph service. Then you can use the access key you received at onboarding to query the GraphQL service and build solutions.

Applications (apps) for Content Graph are generally content search or content delivery.

• Content search – Create custom search tools that transform user input into a GraphQL query and then process the results into a search results page. You can extend the logic behind these queries to enable highly-customizable search experiences. Also, Content Graph's search is very efficient compared to other Elasticsearch-based searches.
• Content delivery – Because it can expose the content in a CMS site as a graph you can query, you can build dynamic content blocks by querying data and shape as needed. For example, you may create a Related articles content block that queries the five most recent articles with the same tag or content type and displays titles, links, and an associated image asset in a block.
• Headless content delivery – Because GraphQL calls return CMS data as a JSON object, Content Graph can enable cross-application and cross-framework delivery of content. For example, you could create an app that pulls content from CMS into the app and renders it in a mobile-native format. With this approach, you can create custom mobile apps with the same content as your traditional websites.

Content Graph and Optimizely Search & Navigation

Content Graph provides similar functionality to Optimizely Search & Navigation, but are technically different. Content Graph is not intended to replace for Optimizely Search & Navigation; it is a separate product that can also provide similar functionality to Optimizely Search & Navigation. Content Graph has faster performance and added features, but you may not need to invest in additional features and performance gains, so Optimizely continues to support Optimizely Search & Navigation.

The benefits of a Content Graph-based search service include:

• Faster search results
• Better error handling
• More flexibility over search logic
• Cross-application and cross-platform search capability