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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 four key capabilities:

  • Content management - Matrix

  • Search and insights - Funnelback

  • Integration - Connect

  • Data services - Datastore

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 Matrix at first, later bringing on Funnelback to add a more powerful search or Connect to integrate with their in-house platforms.

Table of Contents

Matrix

Matrix is a full-featured CMS that manages your whole web presence, from small microsites to large complex websites with a deep structure. Matrix takes care of your website’s templating, rendering, and routing for traditional solutions delivered through CDN. Content in Matrix can be rendered through as many different templates as you like, for different channels, or accessed through API for headless builds.

Read the API resources documentation for more information about using APIs in Matrix.

One Matrix system 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.

Matrix allows 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 Matrix documentation for more information about Matrix functionality.

Most teams new to the Squiz DXP start by learning Matrix. You can get started by creating a site using a template, or dive into the details by building your site from scratch.

Funnelback

Funnelback is a powerful search and insights engine 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 Funnelback’s suite of tools to transform, audit, and analyze your content, empowering content editors and site builders to improve content and search quality.

Developers and site builders work within Funnelback to set up collections of websites or other content repositories, configure field mappings and customize the results rendering templates.

Developers can also use the Funnelback 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.

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

Connect

Connect 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.

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

Developers can get started with Connect in the Connect Getting started documentation.

Datastore

Datastore is 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 Datastore, 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 Datastore does the rest for you.

Datastore allows you to simulate your APIs locally, so developers get a fast feedback loop and can work quickly.

Datastore is an excellent way for developers to build new data-driven experiences quickly without adding more and more third-party platforms to maintain. Migrating or replacing legacy custom database solutions on Datastore can help pay down your tech debt.

You can get started with Datastore by using the Datastore tutorials.