Enonic: A flexible platform for the future

Enonic is a Norwegian software company that develops and delivers the open-source digital platform Enonic XP, that you can use to create websites, apps, and APIs—which in turn you can host and scale in the managed cloud solution Enonic XC.

Perhaps you knew this already and are asking yourself “so what?” Many vendors offer CMS capabilities and fully managed clouds. What sets Enonic apart? Besides having an awesome ecosystem and community, Enonic is more than a simple CMS and cloud. Let’s see how.

Headless core

Enonic is headless to the core. What this means is that the platform is built to present and reuse content in any channel—whether it be yesterday’s computer, today’s smartphone, or tomorrow’s IoT.

The Enonic platform is built around structured content. This specifically takes form as content types in Enonic XP—where every content item must have a defined content type. When every piece of content has a defined type, you achieve flexibility and possibilities in the way you can make rules for interaction, combine content types, and reuse your content across disparage channels.

Together with structured content, Enonic also offers flexible APIs for delivering to any channel of your choice. Enonic uses GraphQL—a complete API enabling front-end developers to control exactly what to fetch from the server and present in their applications.

Many pure headless vendors are essentially offering a glorified database with an API, but Enonic’s solution goes beyond basic features and enables tree structure, flexible permission handling, and media management. For example: being able to easily manage and edit images is a feature that will save you both time and resources.

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Hybrid CMS

While headless CMS sounds great for developers and content reuse across multiple channels, what about the good, old web editing experience? Websites and editorial content will still exist for the foreseeable future, so how should web editors and marketers approach a headless database and APIs?

Truth is, they do not have to at all. Enonic is a hybrid CMS—which means you can have a classic CMS editor for website management purposes and at the same time have headless capabilities with structured data in the core and flexible APIs. In this way, both developers and editors are made happy.

Future-proof

What does future-proof mean? This is not just another buzzword, but a descriptive term designating certain characteristics of a digital platform that should provide value not only in the next five years, but in the next decades. How can such a feat be achieved?

Modern

After over a decade in the industry, Enonic understood that old monolithic systems and page-oriented digital platforms were not the way forward. Taking valuable experience and user feedback into account, Enonic XP was thus built from the ground up with modern tools and frameworks, and launched in 2015.

Enonic XP’s modern architecture is based on microservices principles, by providing a runtime, CMS, and a storage component. Unlike cloud based platforms requiring provisioning, XP uses apps to instantly get access to XP’s platform services like storage and search. The XP runtime is capable of running multiple apps in a single instance, enabling modularization of a single “microservice.”

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Flexibility

Enonic XP is a highly customizable platform. With the platform you can create an app, APIs, self service, logistics system, intranet, blog, or complex website. The flexible content modelling allows for virtually any content type, be it articles, profiles, events, redirects, recipes, FAQs, case studies, services, testimonials, or quotes.

Furthermore, Enonic XP is easy to integrate with other systems, for instance through pre-existing applications from the Enonic Market, or through APIs and the JavaScript MVC framework. There are also several pluggable features, like authentication and widgets.

Finally, being an open-source software, Enonic runs in any cloud, on premises, and on any OS.

Developer friendly

Enonic XP is based on modern and widespread programming languages and technologies, and ships with a powerful developer SDK and CLI. Together with the use of server-side JavaScript for application development, it is really easy for any web developer—PHP, .net, Java, Python, and so on to quickly become productive with Enonic XP.

Enonic is also thoroughly documented and features an active and engaged community for sharing experiences and asking for help, on Slack and the online forum.

Web editor friendly

Enonic’s Content Studio provides an excellent content editing experience for marketers—by grace of being responsive, having a content tree for quick navigation and content overview, and familiar keyboard shortcuts.

Other highlights include a powerful image handling tool, lightning-fast search, responsive and fully functional preview, visual page editing, and collaboration through issues management.

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Leader in Web Experience Management

Enonic was ranked as “Leader” in the SoftwareReviews 2022 Data Quadrant Report. This is a comprehensive evaluation and ranking of 18 leading Web Experience Management vendors, providing a customer-based overview and comparison of platforms across several dimensions, including:

• Net Emotional Footprint
• Vendor Capabilities
• Product Features
• Likeliness to Recommend

To not only thrive and flourish in the future, but in order to stay alive at all, your business needs to adapt to the changes brought forth by digital transformation. We believe Enonic is a particularly strong, lightweight, and agile platform to deliver future-proof operations in everything from marketing and content digesting to logistics and self-service.