Cloud Connected

UI feature - Folder Navigation Tree

Jul 27

Cloud CMS now provides a left-hand Folder Tree in the Folders view. Although a relatively simple feature, the left-hand Folder Tree makes navigation between folders much easier and is a familiar way to view and navigate content.

The left-hand Folder tree can be enabled or disabled from the Project Settings page (set to disabled by default).

After the left-hand Folder Tree is enabled, it can then be seen under Browse By Folder. If a folder contains one or more folders within it, then there is an arrow pointing towards the folder. If the arrow is clicked on then it turns to point down at the new subset of folders. This hierarchical structure of folders makes it easier to understand where you are and to jump around between locations.

Any questions?

I hope this article encourages you to further explore the many features of Cloud CMS. If you have a question, or cannot find a feature you are looking for, or have a suggestion - please Contact Us. 

Customizing the Cloud CMS User Interface

Jul 24

Cloud CMS is incredibly powerful and feature rich. This is great except that in exposing all the powerful features the UI can easily appear cluttered and difficult to use.

We recently added the ability to customize the UI to declutter, simplify, and make more familiar.

Navigation

The UI has been simplified to make navigation easier. The number of left-hand menu options has decreased because of the new “Manage Platform” and “Manage Project” sections. These two new sections have moved all of the administrative and developer links into a separate place. This has allowed for the UI navigation to become much simpler for editorial teams because the set of menu items is much smaller, making items easier to find.

Example:

Default Document View

Updated Document Menu Settings

Updated Document View

Dashboards

A new feature of Cloud CMS are the platform and project level dashboards. Through a drag-and-drop feature, administrators and users are able to configure their tools and views. Users have the ability to customize layouts and decide the particular dashlets wanted of their home page. Administrators decide the levels of customization users are allowed to have, with their ability to lock things down as necessary on a per-project basis.

Platform Dashboard layout

Any questions?

I hope this article encourages you to further explore the many features of Cloud CMS. If you have a question, or cannot find a feature you are looking for, or have a suggestion - please Contact Us.

Bulk Import

Jun 12

Why is there a need for Bulk Import for existing content into a CMS? Content is extremely valuable and expensive to recreate. It’s too valuable to lose and recreating it manually can be a daunting prospect. Your existing content is an important concern at the start of any CMS project – how to migrate content and the related costs is a very important consideration.

If there is content that does need to be imported into the CMS then you will need to have a robust repeatable automated process such that:

1. content can be reused
2. the quality of the content is maintained
3. and additional migration costs are not incurred.

The need for Bulk Import

1. One-time “bulk import”, eg. Initial Content Import. Quite often you’ll have a lot of your content in a digital format at the beginning of your project, and, depending on how much there is, this content can be time consuming to enter.

2. “Incremental Import” scenarios. Regular updates from external systems: it would be nice if all content was ‘happily’ in one internal system and only managed in one place. Unfortunately this ideal world doesn’t always exist: typically, CMS initiatives are in phases – one project at a time, or 3rd party content, eg. external product updates. This means that at times some content is managed externally and will need to be imported or updated at regular intervals.

The Cloud CMS solution:

Cloud CMS provides a command line tool (https://www.cloudcms.com/documentation/api/content-services/bulk-import) that you can use to bulk import data into your content repository branches. This allows you to migrate existing data into Cloud CMS within a single transaction – everything goes in or nothing goes in (transactional).

This process is intended to support one-time “bulk import” scenarios as well as “incremental load” scenarios.

The bulk import mechanism allows you to programmatically enter your pre-existing content, saving time and reducing the errors that can happen when doing repetitive content entry.

Features:

• Bulk import does suggest large numbers of records to be imported. We have tested the Cloud CMS Bulk Import process with hundreds of thousands of records. It worked well and fairly quickly. If you have a large content import then please contact us to discuss or assist.
• Transactional: if one record fails to import then will rollback
• As long as the content in the import file has a structured format then it can be imported
• Can import into related content types
• Can define and create the Content Type in the import
• If a content record exists in Cloud CMS, will overwrite the content record in Cloud CMS

Any questions?

I hope this article encourages you to further explore the many features of Cloud CMS. If you have a question, or cannot find a feature you are looking for, or have a suggestion - please Contact Us.