Rock U - Content Management - Rock as a CMS

Transcribed Video Content

Part of building a good CMS is making sure that it's simple enough so that your staff can easily update things on your site without having to know anything technical, but at the same time, you can do some powerful building with things HTML code and more so that your site is super extensible. We'll talk about how we weigh that balance in Rock now. You may think that under the hood, every Rock site has a different setup, whether it's the external website that comes out of the box, the internal site, a site that's built on Rock, and more. But when it comes down to it, everything is built on a reusable and easy to update pattern. For example, we're looking at a set of zones here with different blocks on them, and let's step through Rock as a CMS. So there are two tensions that we try to solve with our CMS, which is flexibility for builders, meaning being able to use things HTML and CSS and programming to build super extensible sites that can do whatever you want, but that are also simple and easy for people that don't know programming languages to edit and actually create sites from scratch. We also wanna balance consistent design and freedom to add. So this is how we solve that. Layouts and themes are the first thing. Rock has many great layouts and themes that come out of the box, and you can actually create your own layouts and themes as well to make your site always look it's your own. Then blocks and content tools give people who are editing a workspace to create things, but anything they create ends up coming out looking the theme of the site and fits into the layout as well. Then structured components, they keep broken markup off the site in the first place. It just makes it simple and easy to edit in one place. Then this is what the real structure of the c m the CMS in Rock looks . There's a site. Within the site, there are many pages. Those pages have a layout. Again, many come out of the box, so you can create your own layouts, but an example would be a sidebar layout the one you see here. And those layouts have multiple zones that you can drop blocks into. So they're super flexible, and then these blocks hold content that you use to display what actually goes on your site. And here are some quick examples. The HTML content block, a super important flexible one that everyone can learn to use to put whatever sort of content you want to display on your site using HTML or even structured content. Then content channel blocks take a stream of items, whether it's something a blog, news, a podcast, super flexible and easy for anyone to update, and it displays those items. Then content components are just a really nice way to structure some of the content that will show on an external site and make editing easy. With sites, pages, layouts, zones, and blocks, you can start seeing how everything fits together so that you can build out your personalized content management system.