Scheduling a Campaign with Uniform’s Releases and Scheduling Feature
Introducing a Modular Visual CMS Platform for Marketers, Developers and Content Creators
Have you ever had a time when you had to launch a product, offer, or deal over a weekend, holiday, or late at night? That can be annoying, difficult, and downright not fun.
Uniform’s new Releases and Scheduling feature can solve this problem!
The Releases feature simplifies creating and editing pages in advance. It allows you to preview and review them in one place and schedule changes to go live automatically.
On top of that, Uniform has another powerful localization feature, allowing content to be filled seamlessly in different locales. You can also change content based on the locale.
With the new features of Releases and Localization, and the current features of lightning-fast deployment, robust integrations, and future-proof technology, Uniform stands out as the ultimate solution for content management and visual workspace.
What is Uniform?
A few months back, our Co-Founder Prashant came to us with sparkling googly eyes introducing this new site-builder that has both content management and visual editor platform system, Uniform.
Uniform like many other site builders, enables marketers to create pages through imported components and publish live into production. Uniform however differs by offering features including but not limited to:
content unification (multiple CMS) and platform integrations.
Some of the developers at Four Nine Digital got so interested, that we went ahead and obtained Uniform Developer Certificates and officially became partners.
See the diagram below for a quick overview of how Uniform works.
Developers P.O.V
As developers, we use our design system to create React components that accept content through props and are completely flexible.
Uniform also allows Authorable Components, or “Patterns” to be created through no-code, which creates less work for developers.
“Patterns” are reusable configurations or templates that standardize implementing certain functionalities or design elements across a website or application.
Marketers/Content Managers P.O.V
Content managers and marketers can go ahead and create templates and pages with the existing components and constrain them to allow (authorize) certain components.
They can also populate and deploy content, schedule a release, create personalizations, and create translations and locales, without needing a developer or writing code!
The Releases Feature
In Uniform, a release is a container for all content changes — whether created, edited, deleted, or unpublished. It allows editors to manage and schedule content updates, campaigns, and product launches.
Releases enable content to be built and reviewed in a preview environment before going live. Once a release is launched, its contents replace the base state of the project, synchronizing updates across multiple pages and entities.
How does the Releases Feature Affect the DORA Metrics
DORA metrics are a set of 4 key performance indicators that have become widely recognized in the field of software development for measuring the effectiveness of DevOps practices.
Here is how the Releases Feature affects the DORA metrics:
Deployment Frequency (DF):
In terms of DF, you could say that Uniform’s Releases feature plays a huge role because multiple parts of the website can be edited simultaneously and deployments can scheduled for any future date.
Lead Time for Changes (LT):
Since releases can be scheduled, the lead time to changes is affected by the team’s ability to generate content and test the release.
Change Failure Rate (CFR):
Uniform also reduces the probability of failure/errors from occurring by displaying validation errors on a release before locking the content. The validation errors also show warnings of other scheduled releases that may be affecting the same content, thus avoiding conflicts. Additionally, each release gets its own preview URL which makes it very easy to test.
Time to Restore Service (TRS):
With Uniform, it's easy to see what went into each release. So we can easily identify when the problem occurred and fix the issue.
Let’s see in depth how the releases feature works.
1. Creating a Release
You can either click the go to the Releases tab in the side navigation and click the button “Add release”, or go inside the virtual editor, open the dropdown (Release Switcher) in the top right corner, and click the button “Add new release”.
You can skip setting a release date and choose that later.
Once you name your release and hit the “Create” button, it creates another version of the current project.
Any changes you make while inside the release will not affect the “base” until it has been launched.
You can easily switch between the original version and releases in the Releases Switcher.
2. Full Preview
Inside a release, you can change the content, pages, and reusable components. In Uniform, the terms are entries, compositions, and patterns.
The best part? You can fully preview the changes within the release!
While inside the release, you can open the menu and click “Preview”, which opens a tab with a shareable URL. Editors don’t have to create a Preview URL whenever there are changes, and can easily share the link with designers, product owners, or stakeholders for review.
Inside the Releases tab, you can look at the list of changes in the release. You can delete individual changes to revert to the Base release.
3. Locking the Release
In Uniform, locking a release means making the release content read-only, preventing any further changes before it is launched.
This ensures the integrity and consistency of the release content. If further modifications are needed, the release must be unlocked, edited, and re-locked to maintain the schedule.
It is very easy to lock a release. Just click the button “Lock for Launch” in the release you are trying to launch.
After clicking, a pop-up will open to finalize the lock. If there is any unpublished content, it will automatically publish with the launch.
Once a release is published, the changes will merge into the base project.
4. Multiple Releases
Uniform allows multiple releases, allowing multiple editors to change different parts of the site independently of each other.
Localization and Translation Support
Uniform enables the creation of internationalized projects by supporting both localization and translation. Localization serves different content to specific locales, and translation serves the same content in different languages.
Key features include:
- defining locales with display names and codes
- configuring properties for localization
- enabling locale-specific content editing
Uniform also supports structural localization, allowing specific content components to appear only in designated locales. Additionally, Uniform provides strategies for resolving locale values on the front end, ensuring the correct localized content is displayed based on user preferences or browser settings.
Combined with releases features, localization becomes a very powerful tool.
For instance, if there are 10 different languages on the website, each regional team can make their own edits and schedule releases when they are ready!
With this feature, Uniform has become a platform that is great for growing teams internationally who can control their language and campaigns based on their timelines.
1. Creating Locales
Like releases, you can open the language switcher dropdown in the top right corner, or click the side navigation’s globe icon in the visual editor.
Like releases, whatever content changes you have made in that locale will not affect the base language. In this case, the base is English. You can change other languages to become the default with 1 click of a button.
You can combine this with the releases feature and keep the translations/regional changes only within a release so as not to affect the base branch.
2. Structural Localization
When a whole component or structure needs to be localized, a composition(page as component) must enable localization.
Changing a component’s structure means you can show or un-show items, and change their order depending on the locale.
For instance, in the example below, Localization is enabled for the Hero component, and currently, there are two different Hero’s for English(USA) and Japanese(Japan).
Only the Hero Component whose Local Visibility is set to “Japanese” is visible when the dropdown is selected to “ja-JP”, and the same goes for Engish when it is selected at “en-US” on the dropdown.
4. Localized Routes
When creating a page, you can choose to make your path static, dynamic, or locale.
In Dynamic Pages, you can create hundreds of pages without creating a composition for each from CMS by looping through data.
Localized routes can do the same thing. You can loop through translated content for the different locales, and pages will dynamically be created depending on the number of locales you saved in your Settings.
5. Generative AI Filling in Translations for Locales
Using ChatOpenAI integration, you can automatically fill in translation content for selected inputs. You can follow the steps in the Generative AI recipe for more details.
Conclusion
Launching digital content in advance can be challenging, whether it’s a minor update like a weekend promotion or a major campaign for a holiday or product launch.
For this reason, we highly recommend trying out Uniform with the new Releases and Localization feature, which ensures everything runs without problem and does not require someone to be available, even on holidays or weekends.
Uniform is especially great for teams aiming to grow and have international teams or various teams simultaneously updating the website.
Four Nine is a certified Uniform Partner, and a full-service Digital Agency located in Vancouver, BC. Learn more about us by visiting our website or contact us at info@fournine.digital.
