WCMS and SmartEdit - Key concepts and features

It enables the customer to manage pages and content of multichannel-websites like banners, text, images, product carousels and other components. Marketing campaigns may be integrated in the website by setting the conditions for the visibility of components and pages.

• CMS Component: A piece of content in a page. It may be directly rendered or used by its container to render a complex view like a JavaScript slider.
• Slot: Area in the page to render a group of components
• Restrictions: Conditions which hide or show a CMS component
• Page Template: Defines the number and name of slots of a page. It may contain slots with pre-filled components. These components are shared between all the pages which use this template.
  • While it defines the slots, it doesn't define a layout or design. However they can be used to switch between different page layouts.
  • In other words, there isn't any JSP associated to the page template. Each page has a JSP and all the JSPs of the pages belonging to a template could have the same layout.
  • The final positioning of the slots on the page is done in the JSP of the page.
• By default there are two content catalogue versions: online and staged
• Content Catalogue: Contains pages, page templates, content slots, restrictions and components. They are assigned to one or many CMS Sites.
• Synchronization: Updating one or more target catalogue version with the content a source catalogue version
• Navigation Node: It is a page, url or media which could be directly accessed by the visitors of your website.
• Component Type Group: Set of components types allowed in a content slot

• Good explanation of the data model of the WCMS
• All the CMS Types extend from CMSItem or CMSRelation. Both superclasses are content catalog aware.
• A page, component, slot or template can be used in many CMS Sites. They would be assigned to the same content catalogue and this catalogue is shared among many CMS Sites.

• Supports different types of content
  • dynamic: depends on the context
  • static content: The same for every customer
  • structured: e.g. product data
  • unstructured: e.g. buying guides
• Deep linking of products, pages, categories, etc. using custom URLs.
• Based on the following extensions:
  • cms2: Core hybris types of the WCMS
  • cms2lib: Reusable components. Out-of-the box comes with the banner, product detail, product list and rotating image components.
  • cmsbackoffice: Backoffice configuration of the hybris types
  • cmsfacades: Synchronization, versioning, permissions and media search services and facades
  • cmsoccaddon: Provides a REST API to query page and component information. It should be used by the frontend.
  • cmswebservices: Provides a REST API to query and manipulate content catalogue versions, CMS components, CMS medias, navigation nodes, languages of the websites, page, page types, content slots, CMS restrictions and synchronize CMS items. This REST API must be used to access the CMS data from other systems.
  • previewwebservices: Used by the Live Preview to send the preview parameters to the frontend

• They control the visibility from components and pages.
• Hybris comes out-of-box with the following restrictions: Product, Time, User, Catalogue, Category and Usergroup.
• To add a restriction to a component, you have to go to the visibility context section of the editor area and add a new instance of any of the above restrictions.
• The accelerator includes an additional restriction, the storefront experience restriction, which enables to set the visibility for mobile devices or desktop computers.
• The BTG extension defines a Customer Segment Restriction
• Each pageType have a list of restrictions types which are applicable to it.

The restriction are evaluated during the rendering of the CMS tags by the method DefaultCMSPageSlotComponentService.getCMSComponentsForContentSlot(..) and flattenComponentContainerHierarchy(..) which only return visible components.

• Edition modes with different degrees of freedom to change components and slots
• Pages and Storefront
  • In-place WYSIWYG editing of pages and components
  • Versioning of pages
  • Synchronization of pages and management of the edit status of pages
  • A preview context with a content catalogue version, a language, an arbitrary time and product catalogue may be used to preview the site and test restrictions
    • This information is passed in the url to the frontend. The CMSSiteFilter gets the id of the previewTicket and loads the data.
    • The frontend must implement the SmartEdit Contract for Storefronts
• Navigation: Manage navigation nodes
• Use of workflows to guide the edition and approval of those changes

Steps to create a CMS website
Steps to create a cms component
WCMS Integration in the accelerators
Customizing the Accelerator with extgen and modulegen

• Page templates must be created in the backoffice cockpit or using Impex
• To change the usage of the attributes name and uid is a difficult and long task because of the way the wizards use them.

• There currently no way to synchronize the navigation nodes inside SmartEdit (with SAP hybris 1905)
• Wizards for for the creation or selection of items with decision, mandatory, reference and type selector pages can't be created. This was a feature of the deprecated WCMS cockpit.

• The popup editor can't open another popup. This means that you if you have a complex tree of components, the editors in the WCMS cockpit support four levels of components (slot, component container in the component editor, child component in the component editor, another component in popup editor).
  

Test this case on SmartEdit

–Based on SAP Hybris 1905