5 Content Studio features you didn’t know

Content editors love Enonic XP and the associated CMS, Content Studio. According to a report by Boye & Co, several customers report that Content Studio is “easy to work with and master, thus making them more productive.”

So, Content Studio is user-friendly, visually appealing, and responsive—mixed with powerful publishing, handy collaboration, and easy third-party integrations. Are there any features left you didn’t know about? Let’s see if you were aware of these hidden gems.

Focal point

Working with images can be a tedious affair—making several versions in an image editor, to be displayed in different places on your digital experiences. Boring and time-consuming. In Content Studio you upload an image once. Period.

In addition to offering crop, rotate, flip, and styling options, Content Studio brings about a feature that will blow your mind and rock your world—the focal point.

“What in blazes is a focal point,” you ask? Imagine that you have several aspect ratios for a given image to be presented on your websites and apps. Where an ordinary CMS would have you produce several versions of the same image—landscape, portrait, and so on—Content Studio simply lets you choose a point on the image to be the focus of every rendering.

If you have a vertical image of a giraffe, a designated 3:1 aspect ratio will chop that neck off without thinking twice. In the olden days you would have to launch your image editor and manually edit the giraffe’s head into 3:1 country. In Content Studio, however, all you need to do is to assign that focal point and the system will handle the rest—for every rendition.

Keyboard shortcuts

An efficient way to work is to type fast on your keyboard, never letting your flow be interrupted by occasional uses of the mouse. But to navigate a graphical user interface with your keyboard is no simple matter of pushing arrows, you also need to use keyboard shortcuts.

Luckily, Content Studio features a nice list of keyboard shortcuts, familiar to anyone with experience in Windows or Mac OS—like Ctrl + S / ⌘ + S for saving. Here is a small selection:

For a complete list of all the keyboard shortcuts in Content Studio, take a look at our documentation.

See also: This is what customers say about Enonic »

Dependency widget

With a steadily growing website you can easily get lost in the increasing number of new pages, blog posts, images, and other pieces of content. What links to what? What links are inbound and what links are outbound in a given content?

Don’t worry, Content Studio’s got your back. As a default there is a nifty little tool called the Dependencies widget that shows you exactly the number of different contents (and their types) in Content Studio that links into a given content, and the same for outbound links.

The widget even lets you click on the different content type icons to get an overview of every inbound or outbound content. In this way, you always get full control over what links to what in your own CMS. The dependencies widget can be especially useful when you’re publishing and want to see whether other contents are mandatory.

Watch our video: Short introduction to Enonic Content Studio »

Component View

Whenever you’re working on large landing pages, the various sections, columns, and content elements tend to become bewildering. Wouldn’t it be nice to get a schematic, a blueprint of the landing page?

The Component View is available in the upper right corner of the page editor, and gives you a no-nonsense overview of all the components of a page—like region, layouts, texts, and parts—and their place in the page hierarchy. You can click a component to be transferred directly to it on the page.

You can even edit from the Component View. Drag and drop to reorder, delete, duplicate, edit, or insert new components.

Fragments

In Content Studio you are always encouraged to reuse content, whether it’s a person profile to be used in multiple articles or a case study to be showcased on several pages. But it's even possible to reuse content within content and layouts! Enter fragments.

A fragment consists of contents and components you have put inside a layout in the page editor. When editing, you can at any time choose to save a layout and its constituent contents and components as a fragment. This essentially creates a reusable component that can be inserted at will into other articles, or even into your existing page.

Any change to the fragment will then be reflected in all the places the fragment is present. This is particularly useful if you have a section you want to use on several pages, for instance a presentation of your company.

You can also detach a fragment from its parent to customise it on a specific page. But be aware that any change you make to the original fragment will no longer reflect on the detached fragment, which has been converted back to its constituent parts—like texts, buttons, or other parts.