Build a solid foundation for developing, customizing, and extending Optimizely CMS solutions. This learning path guides you through key developer skills—from CMS fundamentals and content integration to API usage, UI customization, and content personalization—preparing you to create scalable, optimized, and tailored digital experiences.
PaaS CMS Development Fundamentals (CMS 11)
This set of developer courses covers the fundamentals of developing for Optimizely CMS 11 through over eighteen hours of content. You’ll learn everything from getting started and working with content types and blocks to organizing, optimizing, securing, and deploying your site. Where relevant, the courses also highlight key differences between CMS 11 and CMS 12 to help you prepare for future upgrades.
This forty minute course for developers looks at different ways to modify the Optimizely CMS editor. Starting with a look at how content synchronizes and how the database is affected by adding and modifying content, we move on to a look at various properties and other features that can be used to customize your display. Course resources are provided to get you up to speed, but familiarity with basic database concepts and .NET data types and display properties is required.
In this one hour developer course—with thirty minutes of exercises—we cover how to customize the default behavior and capabilities of the Optimizely CMS’s rich text editor. The course covers both CMS 11 and CMS 12, focusing on a wide variety of text editing issues.
In this 30 minute developer course, you will learn how to customize and extend the Optimizely User Interface to suit the needs of your business. We cover a variety of methods, ranging from simple drag-and-drop changes to plug-ins and gadgets. Highlights include: Working with plug-ins and gadgets in isolation and from add-ons, and Implement sending notifications as an example extension.
In this developer course consisting of thirty minutes of instruction followed by exercises and activities for you to complete, you will learn how to connect external content to you Optimizely site, so that you can both display the content on your site and manage it from your Optimizely dashboard. You will cover: Partial Routers, which display the content on your site using the same templates as other content, and Content Providers, which will synchronize data between your site an and external source.
In this course, you will learn how to personalize a visitor’s experience on a website by using the Optimizely Visitor Group feature. You will explore some of the built-in Visitor Group criteria that integrates all Optimizely products, and then learn how to build your own custom criteria.
This two hour developer course—with and additional four hours of exercises— explores Optimizely’s Repository APIs. These allow you to perform major site content changes and updates programmatically. Highlights include: Manage site content with the IContentRepository, and site categories with CategoryRepository, Create, Update, and Delete sites using the ISiteDefinitionRepository, Manage access rights using the IContentSecurity repository, and Enable ILanguageBranchRepository to programmatically change languages and assist in localization
This thirty-five minute developer course, with an additional forty minutes of exercises, explores Optimizely add-ons and how they are distributed. These add-ons can be created by you, or added to your site from the Optimizely App Directory. Highlights include: A look at how add-ons function in the Optimizely ecosystem, Examples of simple add-ons and a guide to add-on distribution, and A look at the Optimizely App Directory.