Short introduction to Content Studio

Enonic is a content platform that can be delivered headlessly to any front-end. The best way to manage content on our platform is through “Content Studio”—which essentially is our CMS.

Whether you are completely new to Enonic or have some experience, here is a short introduction to Content Studio and its most important features:

Content Navigator: Quick basics

Enonic’s Content Studio consists of two levels: Content Navigator and Content Editor—or Browse View and Edit View.

In Content Navigator there are initially two panels—a content tree navigation to the left and a preview to the right.

The content tree displays all your content items, and can be managed to represent the structure of your actual website. However, you can organize the content in any way you like independent of your front-end.

Content Navigator is the place where you can create, edit, archive, duplicate, move, sort, and preview any piece of content—whether it is a case study, landing page, blog post, profile page, redirect, folder, etc.

Finally, Content Navigator features a super-fast search function in the top left corner. Search for any term you like, and filter the search by content types and time range with instant results.

Also consult our Content Studio documentation »

Content Editor: Quick basics

Content Editor features a content form to the left and a page editor to the right. Depending on the content type, the forms may be used to fill in texts, images, and checkboxes, which in turn are previewed in the page editor panel.

Some content types, like landing pages, allow you to edit directly in the page editor.

Here you work with components like layouts, texts, parts (advanced components), and fragments (reusable components).

If you get lost in long and complex landing pages, the component view in the upper right can show you the structure of the page.

Access widgets through the Context Panel

Both the Content Navigator and the Content Editor feature a Context Panel to the upper far right—represented by a gear icon.

The Context Panel contains a number of widgets that enrich and expand the content—like version history, emulator, dependencies, and components.

The Context Panel may also include third-party extensions like Google Analytics, Siteimprove, SEO Meta Fields, and VW Optimizer. This is an easy way to gain instant insight into a content’s performance or search engine optimization.

Build great front-end with great content: Build a fast and modern site with Next.js and headless CMS »

Other key features

Responsive

Content Studio is fully responsive, making smart use of Enonic’s panel system.

For instance, on a large screen you can see the Content Form panel, the Page Editor panel, and the Context Panel at the same time.

On smaller screens you may only have room for one panel at a time, and then you can easily switch between panels after need.

Also, Content Studio consists of big buttons and sliders—which come in handy when editing on a touchscreen.

Keyboard shortcuts

Doing everything from a keyboard can speed up content management considerably.

If you master the familiar keyboard shortcuts in Content Studio, you no longer have to switch between keyboard and mouse operations.

This enables you to focus on the things that really matter: creation and management of your content.

Issues

Whether you need someone to proofread your text, find a missing image, or report a bug, you can create an issue from the top panel and assign it to your relevant colleague.

Close and reopen issues, chat to ensure collaboration and progress, and receive instant email notifications when there are updates.

User roles and permissions

In the Enonic platform you decide what user roles there will be on your site and what their respective permissions are.

An administrator will e.g. have full access, an editor can publish, a writer can write, but not publish, and so on. It’s all up to you.

Projects and layers

If you have multiple brands or the need for different sites, all that content tends to be cluttered when stored in the same place.

Enonic's project feature lets you isolate content from different sites, keeping it separated and thus reducing browsing and searching confusion by hapless editors.

Also, if your content is present in different countries or markets, you can solve this challenge with our layers functionality.

Layers let all the content of one parent layer, e.g. English, be inherited by its child layers, for instance Spanish and Mandarin, in order to be localized.

All content in the different layers are hereby isolated, letting editors publish and edit them separately.

First published 28 August 2019, updated 9 December 2022.