The hybrid Gentics Content Management Platform combines our successful web content management system Gentics CMS with our innovative headless CMS Gentics Mesh.
In this chapter, we will introduce our basic design principles and our architectural choices, then give an overview of the components.
Guiding Principles
When developing new features, improving on existing functionalities and prioritizing our roadmap, there are a number of principles that guide us:
- The Gentics Content Management Platform is a sophisticated product with great usability. We constantly manage the balancing act between having all the functionality you would expect from an enterprise-grade CMS, while minimizing the need for training your editorial teams.
- The Gentics Content Management Platform is an extensible product, that provides exactly the components you need. Many features are opt-in in order to keep unnecessary complexity away from you, your developers and your operations team. When enabled, features seamlessly become part of the integrated solution.
- The backend of the Gentics Content Management Platform is separated completely from the frontend — so you can perform upgrades of the CMS without affecting your availability. Security also benefits, as the backend can reside in a different, protected network segment.
- Our user interfaces strive to be the easiest to use on the CMS market, and our intuitive “what you see is what you get” editing capabilities set the standard.
- Integration with your office tools needs to be perfect — whether it’s your word processor, your digital asset management, your workflow tools, …
- Our user interfaces adapt to your device — so you can be productive wherever you need to be. Everything is web-based, no apps or client installation required.
- Our software scales according to your requirements, and all components support clustering to meet your availability or performance demands. We support a wide variety of deployment scenarios, both on-premise and in the cloud.
- Updated versions of the Gentics Content Management Platform are made available frequently and installing shall not cause any headaches. We seek to keep manual changes to a minimum and clearly communicate it when necessary via our changelog.
Overall Architecture
As a company developing content management systems since the early 2000s, Gentics introduced the “hybrid CMS” approach in 2017, thereby forming the basis for the Gentics Content Management Platform.
To give you an introduction to our architecture, let’s introduce three different approaches:
Traditional web content management systems like Gentics CMS are designed and optimized for the content creator, by giving him/her a tool to easily create and publish websites without requiring technical expertise. Features like real-time preview and “what you see is what you get” editing cater to these needs.
However, traditional web content management systems fall short when producing content that shall be used on platforms different to the web, like mobile apps, smart devices, Internet of Things (IoT), etc. As they think of content in terms of layed-out pages on a website, they lack the flexibility of generating output trimmed to the needs the those devices and platforms. This usually results in innovative projects introducing content silos, with no content reuse possible between the platforms.
Headless content management systems like Gentics Mesh, in contrast, are designed for the specific needs of developers. They focus on storing all types of structured content and delivering it openly via great interfaces. This allows for the content to be reused across platforms, from the website to smart devices, IoT, digital signage, …
Any conceivable online channel can be populated and content managed, regardless of the user interface design and structure, with the advantage that web developers have full freedom to build complex applications, great user interfaces, connect to third-party systems, and enable building both simple and complex workflows. This ensures that online projects can always be adapted to changing requirements, and technological developments can always be embraced. Isolated data silos are a thing of the past.
Gentics Content Management Platform brings the advantages of these two concepts together: As a hybrid content management system, it combines the great editor-focused user interface of Gentics CMS with the cross-platform capabilities of Gentics Mesh, resulting in a single platform for all your digital projects. By enabling cross-project reuse, you can produce more up-to-date content with less effort. New digital projects can be realized in shorter timeframes, and you can gradually migrate your web presence to new technologies as they arise, without having to migrate your precious content. Only having a single repository for your content reduces license costs and maintenance effort, eliminates copy-paste content production processes, resulting in higher quality and reduced time to market.
Components
The Gentics Content Management Platform comprises various components, including CMS and Mesh, which are available in both OSS and Enterprise Edition. For more detailed information, please visit Open-Source and Enterprise Edition
Gentics CMS
Gentics CMS is your allround solution for creating, managing and operating online plattforms for large organizations. With the usage of Gentics CMS, content managers are able to create and publish personalized content and services for your online presence. To achieve that, they work in one of the most modern and user-friendly CMS user interfaces, which is also fully usable on any web browser and mobile devices — without having to install apps or other clients. Your daily work is supported by special functionalities regarding internationalization, accessibility, layout and organization of content management workflows as well as centralized management of multiple content channels. Due to the open architecture and the usage of the most modern web technologies, Gentics CMS offers a simple way to access data from external sources and makes it possible to easily integrate different third-party systems. Every functional area provides a consistent user interface that works according to uniform principles. Through constant development, this standard is promoted with every version, taking the feedback from many Gentics Software users into account.
Gentics Mesh Content Repository
Gentics Mesh provides the open headless CMS architecture and serves as a universal storage for all content and data used online. All content that is created and managed by content managers in the Gentics CMS is stored in Gentics Mesh Content Repository. Through the use of Gentics Mesh Content Repository, the stored content is completely independent from the Gentics CMS. Therefore, the user gains universal access to their CMS content and can deploy them in different online projects. As a headless CMS with enterprise features (i.e., internationalization, versioning, roles and authorizations, search, user administration, clustering and plugin system), Gentics Mesh Content Repository offers a scalable plattform, which supplies data to the Gentics Portal via its REST and GraphQL interface. The functionality of Gentics Mesh Content Repository can be expanded at any time by adding Gentics Mesh Plugins.
Gentics Portal
Gentics Portal offers the possibility to create personalized and dynamic intranet solutions and corporate websites. All content that is saved in the Gentics Mesh Content Repository — whether it is created in the Gentics CMS or provided by a external source — can be used to build your website by the Gentics Portal. The content and templates created and managed in Gentics CMS can be rendered in the Gentics Portal by using a template engine. With Gentics Portal as frontend and routing framework, it’s possible to implement various portal applications and widgets as well as to integrate already existing applications. We offer Gentics Portal based on two different web technologies:
- Gentics Portal | java (builds on the Eclipse Vert.x framework)
- Gentics Portal | php (uses the PHP framework Laravel)