Developer overview of Squiz DXP

The Squiz Digital Experience Platform (DXP) allows organizations to manage many websites, web apps, and other elements that make up a complex web presence from a single platform.

Developers can build solutions that site builders can easily reuse, allowing many marketers and content editors to collaborate and own their content.

The platform is composed of a set of capabilities that work together to deliver your digital solution:

  • Content Management

  • Search

  • Integrations

  • Data Services.

Squiz’s approach of an open DXP allows organizations to start with just one capability and integrate with your existing platforms or use everything together. For example, organizations starting with websites might only use Squiz Content Management and Squiz Search and extend this later using Squiz Integrations to connect to in-house platforms.

Content management

Squiz Content Management is a full-featured CMS that manages your whole web presence, from small microsites to large complex websites with a deep structure. Your website’s templating, rendering, and routing for traditional solutions are managed through the CMS and delivered through a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Content can be rendered using many templates tailored for different channels, or accessed using an API for headless builds.

Read the API resources documentation for more information about using the content management APIs.

A Squiz Content Management instance within the Squiz DXP can manage several websites. You can use just one template and provide configuration options to override branding settings to tailor your design system for a given site. This allows you to modify your template once and update your whole fleet of websites. Or, you can use many separate templates for different needs, for example, when you need to delegate developer responsibility to different departments and want to isolate their changes.

The DXP provides user management and workflow to model your organization’s needs with flexible permissions and use SAML or OAuth when you need to sign-in many users from your organization for editing and site-building.

Matrix also has a long list of more specific functionality using its asset-based system, including Forms, Triggers, REST assets, and other integration assets, and many more that are outlined in the documentation.

Read the Content management documentation for more information about the DXP content management functionality.

Most teams begin learning about the content management capabilities of the Squiz DXP first. You can get started by creating a site using a template, or dive into the details by building your site from scratch.

The DXP includes a powerful search and insights engine, powered by Funnelback, that can provide holistic or targeted searches across your different content repositories. It is perfect for building search solutions that work across your web presence, giving you the tools to tailor and tune the experience to suit your organization’s specific needs.

You can use the suite of search tools to transform, audit, and analyze your content, empowering content editors and site builders to improve content and search quality.

Developers and site builders set up searches of websites or other content repositories, configure field mappings and customize the results rendering templates.

Developers can also use the search engine’s headless JSON endpoint and APIs to build search-driven solutions of their own. Search-driven solutions are a great way to aggregate content across a set of websites managed in multiple content management systems.

Search capabilities can be extended by selecting plugins from the growing library or writing and contributing your own.

Developers can find out how to get started with DXP search in the DXP search developer documentation.

Integrations

Squiz Integrations provides a low-code application and data integration platform. It is a simple and customizable way to connect applications and share data between the DXP and your existing ecosystem of platforms or other platforms you want to bring on board.

Developers can set up integration flows using connectors and generic components and write code where they need to - for example transforming data formats using JSON data.

The low code configuration approach allows Developers to hand over the configuration of integrations to less technical stakeholders.

Developers can get started with the DXP integrations capability in the Integrations getting started documentation.

Data Services

The DXP provides a fully-managed, document-oriented data service that uses blueprints in the form of API specifications and data models to simplify storing and querying data for web applications.

Using DXP Data Services, you can rapidly build APIs that are native to the DXP and focus on building your solution front ends (web, mobile, multi-channel). You only have to worry about defining your data model in the blueprint, and the DXP does the rest for you.

You can simulate your APIs locally, so developers get a fast feedback loop and can work quickly.

Squiz Data Services offers an excellent way for developers to build data-driven experiences quickly without adding more and more third-party platforms to maintain. Migrating or replacing legacy custom database solutions to a DXP Data Services Blueprint can help pay down your tech debt.

You can get started with Data Services by following the Data Services tutorials.

Component Service

The Component Service is a core part of the Squiz DXP that allows you to build decoupled front end components with a modern developer experience. Components make it easy for content editors to edit structured content that implements a design system or drives richer more complex experiences.

You can get started with the Component Service by using the Component Service tutorials