Get started with CMS (SaaS)

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Optimizely Content Management System (CMS) (SaaS) provides powerful web content management capabilities through an intuitive user interface, letting experienced and occasional users work efficiently with content. See an interactive demo on how to approach content modeling in Optimizely CMS (SaaS) and Visual Builder. See also Building blocks of the user interface.

Looking for developer information? See Overview of CMS (SaaS) in the Optimizely CMS (SaaS) developer guide.

As an editor or administrator, you usually log in to your application using a specified URL, a login button, or a link. Enter your username and password in the Optimizely login dialog box, and click Log In.

After logging in, what you can do depends on your implementation and access rights because these control the options you see.

CMS (SaaS) has the following views:

  • Dashboard
  • Editing
  • Reports
  • Settings

CMS (SaaS) dashboard

You must have at least edit privileges to see the CMS (SaaS) dashboard.

The CMS (SaaS) dashboard displays information about your content that lets you access it from one place. Each tab displays numbers; to update the numbers, click on the tab titles. 

CMS SaaS Dashboard view

  • Define Content – Click Model Content to open the CMS (SaaS) settings. You can also access the following links:
  • Create Content – Click Create Content to open the Edit view. See Get started with Visual Builder, All Properties editing view, and On-Page editing view. You can also access the following links:
  • Render Content – Open Optimizely Graph to render content with the following links:
  • Workflow Status – Click on any of the tabs, and click any link names to go directly to edit the page. You can sort the Name, Last modified, and Modified by columns by clicking on them. You can also select More (...) to edit the page or edit the workflow for that page. See Approval sequences. The following image shows workflow status activity on 29 pages: 23 Drafts, three In Review, and one each of Approved, Scheduled, or Rejected status. It also shows 22 broken links. When the dashboard is loaded, each tab displays numbers; to update the numbers, click on the tab titles. It also shows the languages in which you can view the information.

    CMS SaaS Workflow status

  • Broken Links – Broken links show the number of broken links in the database, and lists the pages with at least one broken link. If there is more than one broken link on a page, the page is listed only once. For example, if you have only one page with 25 broken links, it displays 25 with a list of only one page. But if you have 25 pages with one broken link each, it displays 25 broken links with a list of 25 pages (five at a time). Also, it displays only content you can edit, so you can click to go to the content to fix the links.

    CMS dashboard with broken links

    Broken links are not automatically updated. You need to refresh the dashboard to update the broken links gadget.
  • Language – Select from the available languages to see the dashboard in that language. The content list in every tab in the workflow status displays only content of that language.

    CMS Dashboard with languages

    Administrators can enable the language filter options. Also, if you go to the dashboard and select Swedish (for example), you can go to another page and Swedish is maintained when you return to the dashboard. However, if you log out, the language filter is reset to the default language.

CMS (SaaS) editing

CMS (SaaS) provides the following editing views:

Optimizely Visual Builder is a new editor interface in CMS (SaaS) that makes content creation and layout building intuitive and accessible to non-technical users. Visual Builder will replace the On-page editing view.

Content creators can design, modify, and reuse layout templates directly in the user interface and create adaptable experiences for any channel without developer involvement. Frontend developers can also empower editors to modify the style of the created content while adhering to brand guidelines. See Get started with Visual Builder and Visual Builder concepts.

CMS SaaS Edit view

CMS (SaaS) reports

Reports are valuable tools for content editors, application owners, marketers, and merchandisers to monitor various application activities. CMS (SaaS) comes with built-in reports.

When you generate a report, select the desired report and the starting point in the page tree from where you want the report to include data, then click Show Report. You can filter data by time and language, and pages included in the report results open in edit view when you click a page link.

Some reports rely on scheduled jobs running in the background to generate report data; see Scheduled jobs.

Select Type of Report to display a report about one of the following subjects.

  • Not Published Pages – Displays pages that have not been published and have a last changed date within a certain period. Select a page from the list of report results to open it in Edit view.
  • Published Pages – Displays pages published within a certain period. Select a page from the list of report results to open it in Edit view.
  • Changed Pages – Displays pages with a changed date within a certain period. Select a page from the list of report results to open it in Edit view.
  • Expired Pages – Displays pages with a stop publish date within a certain period. Select a page from the list of report results to open it in Edit view.
  • Simple Addresses – Displays published pages that have a simple address. Select a page from the list of report results to open it in Edit view.
  • Link Status – Displays unreachable links, perhaps due to a page being moved, an application shut down, or a momentary outage of a target link.

CMS SaaS Reports view

CMS (SaaS) settings

CMS (SaaS) administrators and developers with administrator access rights manage the following CMS (SaaS) user interface settings.

CMS SaaS Settings view