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Inside Brightspot: Editorial content types

You need a CMS with content types that fit your needs exactly, but that’s not always the reality. To best accommodate these needs, fields may need to be added or rearranged, but this generally falls on a developer. Some organizations might be resource-strapped, especially after weathering a pandemic, and might not have the back-end engineers they need to make these changes. Even if they do, making changes to content types can take some time to implement—and at the end of the day, everything must remain intact and unbroken on a variety of front ends.

In a perfect world, organizations and their teams—including editors and non-technical team members—would be able to create their own data models, independent of development. They already know what needs to go where, and in a few mouse clicks, they create exactly what is needed, and with no interruption to the front end. Whether they need to add a new front end entirely or make changes to content that already exists on front ends they already have, they should have that flexibility and confidence that everything will work.

That perfect world is now the reality.

Brightspot CMS, the world-class platform to boost your digital strategy, increases editorial efficiencies and allows editors the freedom they need to achieve the digital experiences they want.

How to create your own content types

The idea looks great on paper, but how does it handle?

With Brightspot, teams can create new content types that include a vast number of fields, like title, author, various toggles, a variety of rich-text editors to suit different publishing needs.

For each field a team adds, they can include advanced settings like character count ranges, uniqueness requirements and more, and each field will then validate against those settings, helping enforce structure to the content that teams create.

Enabling organizations to act in this way saves significant time, especially when defining requirements at the beginning of a project.

This quick turn around also benefits organizations who might launch new apps or push their content to other kinds of interfaces. This feature helps organizations achieve the benefits of a headless CMS while giving content teams some of the power that was previously reserved for more technical team members.

Example use case

Let’s say you're an editor who's in charge of posting news updates to your organization's mobile app about the topics you cover. After your organization sets me up with Brightspot, you want a simple, curated authoring interface for your team, which right now is largely comprised of freelancers.

What you want is a content type called Story, but it doesn’t exist. So, you just make it.

The Story should have a required, unique title (but you don’t want it to be too long, so you're going to enforce a maximum character count of 100). You will name it Story Title.

Since visual content performs really well, you want each Story to have a lead image. So, you will add a required Reference Field field underneath the Story Title field you just made and call it Lead Image. This way, your freelancers can supply the photos for their own stories.

Finally, in this simple Story content type, you need to give your freelancers a way to write stories, so you will add a Rich Text field called Body. You have many options here as far as what tools you want your freelancers to have.

The larger the rich-text editor, the more tools your writers will have at their disposal. Since you want this to be a simple and very focused content type, you will opt for the MediumRichTextEditor. That means your freelancers will have formatting, alignment and list options, and more.

Now that your Story content type is looking good, you will save, and the Story option is now instantly available in Brightspot.

All of the fields I selected for the Story content type are included, and your freelancers are now set to start drafting content for your site.

Empowering editors

After you quickly create content types like this, you can leverage the many other tools Brightspot offers. Content teams like yours can easily add a Story content type, like the one above, into workflows to ensure the right eyes review all content before it goes out the door. And the fact that all of this can be done in minutes gives you the flexibility you need to deliver content to your users wherever they live, whether that's a site, an app, a watch, or anything else.

If you need the world-class platform to boost your digital strategy not just today, but also tomorrow, no matter what it brings, Brightspot is ready to support you.