Documentation > Best Practices and Examples

CrownPeak offers a Database service for existing users of the Content Management System (CMS) and the Web Hosting environment. This database service will operate in the CrownPeak Hosting environment, which is based on Amazon Web Services (AWS). CrownPeak offers several deployment options.

The CrownPeak Software as a Service (SaaS) Platform is a heterogeneous programming environment supporting the development of websites and web applications in a variety of general purpose programming languages (including Java and JavaScript) that are common to the Web Development community. These languages all work in concert with HTML, the standard markup language used to create websites, and web applications.

You can use the minifier API call to reduce the size of your cascading style sheets (css) and javascript (js) files in your hosting environment. The Minifier is an executable file inside Crownpeak that enables you to reduce the size of of your css and javascript files. Reducing the size of these files limits rendering time and your pages publish faster.

Crownpeak DXM is a best-of-breed of platform that easily integrates with other platforms to provide a flexible way for customers to better meet their unique operational and strategic needs. 

These Quick Start guides demonstrate how to integrate with Salesforce in two examples - first with the built-connector and then using the template API.

Crownpeak is excited to launch the first phase of its new user interface, V3. This new User Interface (UI) marks a return to browser based technologies, and an alternative to the Silverlight used in the Volte UI. We are using all of the latest frameworks like HTML5, Angular and Bootstrap and have made some updates to the way the system works to help make managing your content easier than before.

Crownpeak is excited to launch the first phase of its new user interface, V3. This new User Interface (UI) marks a return to browser based technologies, and an alternative to the Silverlight used in the Vote UI. We are using all of the latest frameworks like HTML5, Angular and Bootstrap and have made some updates to the way the system works to help make managing your content easier than before. This section presents a list of frequently asked questions and answers.

This article will help you get started with the Component library. The information here is based on common practices from our Professional Services team and is best for developers and architects seeking to understand template creation with the Component Library available in CMS projects.

Once you finish reading this, you should understand what it is, where to find it and what is included in the Component Library. You'll also learn about the role of definition folders and files and how to use the definitions to create templates for based on your design and front end code.

This is re-purposed from Richard Hamlyn's blog, Learn Crownpeak DXM.

Richard is a Crownpeak Sales Engineer

Project Merge is a powerful tool which has been added to the CMS. This feature allows you to take two Project Branches and merge them into one. This allows you to work on new features an the other changes in isolation and them to combine them safely to be used in one environment.

Dynamic Content allows you to create, edit and manipulate your Web Content Optimizer (WCO) Snippets. In addition to the Snippets, you can edit your Collections. The new user interfaces make working with Snippets much easier in the CMS.

The Site Builder uses a wizard-like experience to assist you in moving CMS content from one instance to another.

Crownpeak is excited to launch the first phase of its new user interface, V3. This new User Interface (UI) marks a return to browser based technologies, and an alternative to the Silverlight used in the Vote UI. We are using all of the latest frameworks like HTML5, Angular and Bootstrap and have made some updates to the way the system works to help make managing your content easier than before.

Crownpeak is excited to launch the first phase of its new user interface, V3. This new User Interface (UI) marks a return to browser based technologies, and an alternative to the Silverlight used in the Vote UI. We are using all of the latest frameworks like HTML5, Angular and Bootstrap and have made some updates to the way the system works to help make managing your content easier than before.

Crownpeak is excited to launch the first phase of its new user interface, V3. This new User Interface (UI) marks a return to browser based technologies, and an alternative to the Silverlight used in the Vote UI. We are using all of the latest frameworks like HTML5, Angular and Bootstrap and have made some updates to the way the system works to help make managing your content easier than before.

Find quality issues in your web pages before they are live in production by using Digital Quality Management (DQM) to test your web page while you are creating them.

Here are some suggested HTML tags that can added to web sites published by the CrownPeak CMS (aka Digital Experience Management, or DXM) in order to make it easier to identify specific information in websites to the CrownPeak Digital Quality Management (DQM, formerly Active Standards) platform. Adding these tags will improve the DQM reporting on your web site, and are often added to web sites in any case to improve site accessibility. Most of these tags exist in either the official HTML or Aria specifications. Those that do not, are prepended with a "cpdqm" prefix to avoid any namespace collision issues, and can be renamed as necessary. These tags will go into the CMS output template files – mixed in with your sites HTML. Some of them will use the template API functions to get data from the CMS while publishing, and some of the tags are simply HTML markup for the DQM scanner to use to identify selected parts of the page.

Render Once, Publish many has been added as an option on the Publishing Package. Adding servers to a single pulbishing package allows for sychronization among those servers as soon as an asset is published. This use of this feature is only suggested for customers who have experienced issues with a delay in sychronization.

The updates to CrownPeak Database as a Service allows you to access your DaaS service and perform updates, such as reconfiguration of tables, columns or views, and/or data update on your own, without having to contact CrownPeak

CrownPeak Package Deploy allows in-house developed business logic to be deployed cleanly, seamlessly and safely alongside a CrownPeak-managed presentation layer for the ultimate in dynamic, multi-channel digital experience solutions.

The Project & Sites feature was added in November 2014 to improve the site creation and management process for instances with multiple sites and multiple teams of developers. This document provides the steps to setup a project folder and site root for implementation. It shows how you can configure a project to be shared by more than one site and a self-contained project to support a single site. Most importantly, this feature is required to take advantage of project branching. Additional information on branching is available here - http://developer.crownpeak.com/Documentation/BestPractices/Code-Branching/Project-Branching.html

The CrownPeak Search G2 Realtime Indexing enhances the existing search platform by providing a direct connection between the CMS and the Search G2 platform. With this enhancement, assets can be built within the CMS for delivery directly to the Search G2 platform upon publication.

The CrownPeak Search G2 CMS Administration Interface enhances the existing search platform by providing a series of self-service, realtime configuration screens, which allow for management of CrownPeak Search G2 Collections.

The CrownPeak Search G2 platform is a highly-scalable, high-performance, enterprise-grade indexing and query platform, based upon the Apache Lucene Software Library & Apache SolrCloud.

HubSpot offers marketing automation software including inbound marketing, SEO blogging and social media tools. The CrownPeak integration provides you with direct access to lead data generated from CrownPeak hosted forms

Project Branching is a powerful tool which has been added to the CMS. This feature allows you to make a copy of your code by branching it. You can then manipulate the code making any desired changes or updates, then view these changes while not affecting the Live website.

The Debug Console is built into the CMS to allow users to analyze their code without needing any additional tools. This capability is very useful when trying to determine why assets are not working as expected. The Debug Console will return debugging statements, notifications and warnings, and error messages for an asset.

Targeting Groups are used to help website visitors focus on items of interest, for example displaying an East Coast conference to a website visitor from Vermont. The WCO Targeting Groups has been redesigned within the CMS authoring experience. This updated feature enables editors to easily create targeting groups using drag and drop technology. The ability to use drag and drop has made using this feature more intuitive and allows much quicker building of Targeting Groups.

The Funnel Dashboard presents a set of widgets that enables you to track the progress of your Testing & Targeting efforts on each of your website properties. The Funnel Dashboard will graphically display the set of WCO snippets which are in a collection being used to focus a user to a final conversion. The funnel graph will visually display how many users start at the first page and how many reach the conversion. This is an easy way to see which of your webpages may need updating due to losing viewers and not clicking to the next webpage.

Custom Reports allow you to create useful datasets which you often need at a moments notice. In the CMS, you can save your Advanced Search criteria with a unique name and later reopen it as a report. This means if you regularly search on pages updated by a specific user, you can enter those conditions in Advanced Search and save as a report. Then anytime you need the information you can select Custom Reports and review the latest data.

Every CMS instance starts out as a fast environment that has been setup and configured to meet the needs of each customer. However, over time even the best CMS instance can become slow due to changes in the configuration and updates to the implementation. Here are some of the ways to diagnose and remediate these issues in your CMS.

Forms are an integral part of any website usually to obtain information from the website visitor. To make using forms effortless, the WCO Form Builder has been redesigned within the CMS authoring experience. This updated feature enables editors to easily create, save, and reuse forms on landing pages and other parts of your website needing a call to action.

There are many benefits to implementing a CMS project using a decoupled architecture while still leveraging all of the rich content of a dynamic platform. CrownPeak uses just such a hybrid architecture that is both agile and secure at the same time.

The CrownPeak Application Program Interface (API) Solution lets you use your content dynamically in custom web or mobile applications. You can access the approved content directly through the CrownPeak APIs, or mix and match API access with published content

The Translation Model Framework (TMF) is a collection of templates created and managed by CrownPeak Professional Services that provides the CrownPeak authoring community the ability to manage multi-lingual content within a site, or localization activities across sites.