Here are some highlights and thoughts from the dotCMS Winter Product Webinar.
The dotCMS team unveiled a major new feature in Experiments. This enables marketers to create multiple variants of a page and monitor customer interactions before promoting the variant which best performs against a defined goal.
It’s great to see A/B testing feature like this tightly integrated into the content supply chain, and on first look it looks well thought out and has the basic configuration you would expect: Scheduling, throttling, configurable weights and statistical analysis are all present.
Customers utilizing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for high performance websites can also able to take advantage this feature. Headless content delivery will be also be fully supported in an upcoming release.
Looking into our crystal ball, it would seem that dotCMS is putting in a strong foundation to make the next natural step and leverage this architecture for personalized content delivery. We envisage a future where AI is leveraged to create, analyze and promote content variations on a large scale.
On the topic of AI, dotCMS have, like most CMS vendors taken the first step to integrate generative AI capabilities into their product. Their approach is to create hooks in the editorial interface where users can create prompts to create content with AI assistance. Think of use cases like ideation, summarizing and image generation.
The final exciting new feature on display was the Headless Editor. DotCMS were early on the scene in 2019 to support in-context editing for headless architecture with their “Edit Mode Anywhere” solution. This is now being replaced with a fully-fledged Headless Editor, designed to give a snappy experience, and have a more flexible and lighter integration footprint on your front-end applications.
After running through the new stuff, the dotCMS team also gave a look at features their team will be working on next. A couple of items grabbed our in attention; Multilingual improvements and “Evergreen versioning”.
DotCMS already has a few techniques to assist with delivering multi-lingual websites, but it’s good to see them giving this topic attention, as it’s a common requirement in our enterprise customer base, especially in Europe.
Currently new features typically reach dotCMS cloud customers when they undertake a full LTS upgrade, typically once a year. Evergreen versioning is all about moving to a more fluid SaaS model, where all customers run on the latest version, and thus can immediately take advantage when new features are released.
They will also continue to improve their Generative AI integration, work on the block editor and consolidate the UX for browsing and searching for content in the backend.
