A Content Management Solution for Your Salesforce Community
The marketing team of a large financial services company presented us with a problem. The team wanted to quickly update the content of its lead-generating website without going through corporate red tape just to make one small change. The process of changing some text or swapping an image was convoluted, requiring the marketing team to send a request to a developer team, which would then make the code changes in a sandbox. Once done, the team would have to wait for the next sprint to move the code to another sandbox for testing, using a change set, and finally push the code to production. The process was long and complicated for something so simple. In fact, one small change could take months to implement.
So, what was our solution?
We built the marketing team a content management system (CMS) within Salesforce. A CMS allows users to design, create, modify, and remove content from a website without any knowledge of HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. Although Salesforce Communities include pre-built components, they are not enough to build a visually appealing, modern website. In addition, they are not all user-friendly. Community Cloud’s CMS Connect feature is also lacking because users can only pull in pre-built content. With our solution, all content is highly customizable, the interface is user-friendly, and the content is up to date with today’s standards in web development. What makes our solution even better? It all lives within Salesforce.
We created the CMS solution within a custom Lightning application. Marketers and content creators can create and edit pages on their community sites. Each page is its own Salesforce record of the Page custom object (Page__c). This Page record holds various metadata, including Page ID, Name, and URL Slug. On each page, users can create, reorder, and delete content and modify the text, colors, layouts, images, URLs, buttons, and more.
On the Community Cloud side, all the administrator needs to do is create a new community with a Build-Your-Own experience. Once generated, the administrator will create a new page in the community, drag the custom component we built onto the page, and paste the Page__c record’s Page ID into the design attribute. Our code pulls in all the content that lives on the page and displays it in the community.
The benefit of this solution is that the time to market is super-fast. Users can create visually appealing content in just minutes. And the best part: there’s no need for any developers or change sets.
Take a peek at what our solution looks like:
About the Authors
Nicole Cote and Nicholas Friedman are full-stack software developers with expertise in Lightning Web Components, Aura Components, and APEX. They specialize in Lightning Applications and Community Cloud.
Cervello, an A.T. Kearney company is a data and analytics consulting firm and part of A.T. Kearney, a leading management consulting firm. We help our leading clients win by offering unique expertise in data and analytics, and in the challenges associated with connecting data. We focus on performance management, customer and supplier relationships, and data monetization and products, serving functions from sales to finance. We are a Silver Consulting partner of Salesforce.
