Create, Organize, and Publish Content

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

List the types of content you can create in Salesforce CMS.
Organize content using collections.
Get content reviewed and approved using the Basic Approval Request workflow.
Identify differences between enhanced CMS workspaces and non-enhanced CMS workspaces.

Create Content in the Digital Experiences App

Tucker Home Goods content experts, Sheng, Elle, and Calvin are ready to create some content in the Digital Experiences app. And honestly, it’s as easy as jumping into the enhanced CMS workspace and getting started.

In the enhanced CMS workspace, click Add | Content.
Select the News content type, which works well for the team’s latest blog post about industrial lighting. Then click Create.
For the title, enter: Industrial Lighting. Notice that the content slug is generated automatically based on the title, but you can always update it if you’d like.
You can enter an API name, but it’s not required. If you don’t enter an API name, it defaults to the content key when you save the content. You can’t edit the API name after you create the content.
In the body, enter: We offer excellent industrial lighting solutions that best fit your needs.
You can add an image and excerpt if you like, but these aren’t required.
Save your changes, then click the back arrow to go back to the enhanced CMS workspace.

To quickly create similar news content in the future, open the content detail page and click Clone. Then edit the content as needed. To return to the workspace and see the draft News content in the content list, click the back arrow.

After he drafts the post, Sheng can either publish the content now or schedule a publish date. Publishing makes the content available to the sites and channels connected to your workspace. After Sheng clicks Publish, Chris can add the blog post to the Tucker Home Goods site and display the content for their customers.

Industrial Lighting News content in Salesforce CMS.

The content team is excited about their first piece of content, but they’d also like more variety in the types of content they can create. So they ask Robert, the developer on staff at Tucker Home Goods, to create a slew of custom content types to meet their needs. Robert uses the CMS Content Type Manager, which is an AppExchange package created by Salesforce Labs. To start, he adds banners, product announcements, and FAQs, and he promises to add more as Sheng and Elle think of new content types. Robert can also create custom content types programmatically by using the Metadata API and Tooling API.

Organize Content with Collections

When Tucker Home Goods has a good bit of content saved in their enhanced CMS workspace, our content experts Sheng and Elle can create collections. Collections are just that: collections of content organized around a theme, audience, or whatever organizational scheme you come up with.

The process for creating collections is different depending on the type of site and workspace that you’re working with.

To add your collection to an Aura site, or if you’re working in a non-enhanced CMS workspace, see Salesforce CMS Collections for Aura Sites. Sheng and Elle work on adding a manual collection to their enhanced LWR site channel. Follow along in your Trailhead playground.

In the enhanced CMS workspace, click Add | Collection.
Enter Lighting for the title, and for the description, write Content about lighting fixtures.
You can enter an API name, but it’s not required. If you don’t enter an API name, it defaults to the content key when you save. You can’t edit the API name after you create the collection.
For Content Type, select News.
Add the Industrial Lighting article, and save your changes.

CMS Manual Collection editing window with the “Lighting” collection.

Sheng and the rest of the content team continue adding News items to the collection until they’re satisfied. When Sheng is ready to publish the collection, he can select which translation languages to publish, if applicable, and he can view and act on related content items.

In this case, Sheng sees that the collection is related to the three news articles within it. To publish his collection, Sheng must also publish all of the individual content items. Sheng selects the related content items (1) and clicks Next (2). In the next step, Sheng chooses to publish the collection now rather than schedule it for later.

Publish window for a CMS Manual Collection with related content.

Now the collection can be displayed in any channel as a tidy package of information. For example, Chris can go into the Tucker Home Goods site in Experience Builder and add the Lighting collection to a Grid component at the top of the home page. She can further customize the component so that the news articles scroll every minute or so. And just like that, the team keeps Tucker Home Goods customers in the loop with all of the latest news about lighting fixtures.

If you’re curious about how you can add CMS content to LWR sites, check out Display Salesforce CMS Content in Your LWR Site.

In addition to collections, you can also organize content in your CMS workspace by using folders. These are only an internal tool for content creators, so unlike collections, folders don’t affect how content gets displayed in your channels.

Get Content Ready for Publish with the Basic Approval Request Workflow

Calvin, the content author in the enhanced CMS workspace, is writing content for Tucker Home Goods’s new sustainable lighting fixtures. He just finished writing a data-rich news article outlining statistics and nitty-gritty details of the product’s efficiency and sustainability. He’s checked the grammar twice, made some last-minute tweaks, and now he’s ready to get it reviewed and approved.

In the Workflows card on the content detail page, he selects Basic Approval Request and clicks Start. When Calvin submits the review request, a few things happen in the background. The system prevents the content from being published, and it sends a request to Elle, the content manager and designated reviewer.

Elle reviews Calvin’s news article and notices a few things that could be improved. She provides some constructive feedback and requests a revision. Calvin accepts her feedback, makes the changes, and resubmits. This time, Elle approves the content, and it’s ready for publication!

The Basic Approval Request workflow is available in all enhanced CMS workspaces as long as Workflows and Approvals are turned on. For now, this built-in workflow meets the needs of the Tucker Home Goods team. But as their workspace grows and as the team’s content evolves, Chris, the Salesforce admin can build new, customized workflows by using Flow Orchestration and Flow Builder.

Working with Workspaces

As of Winter ‘25, any new CMS workspace that you create is enhanced by default, but there are some things you should know about non-enhanced CMS Workspaces.

What’s the same?

There are several essential features that CMS workspaces and enhanced CMS workspaces have in common. In both workspaces, content admins can

Manage workspace settings, contributors, channels, and languages
Export and import content
Export and import content for translation

Content admins, managers, and authors can

Create the same types of content
Use folders to organize their workspace content
Schedule content to publish and unpublish
View the publication calendar to keep track of a schedule’s status

Both workspaces also support custom content types, and developers can use the same methods to create and add them.

What’s different?

But what makes them different? Enhanced CMS workspaces have several more features in addition to the ones they share with non-enhanced workspaces. In enhanced CMS workspaces, you can

Clone content
Review and approve content with Workflows
Review related content items to ensure you’re not publishing something before it’s ready
Remove channels to better control where your content is available
Use advanced search functionality to maximize search results across all the content in your workspace
Save time and space in enhanced CMS workspaces by sharing and reusing content across workspaces without duplicating records. To set up sharing between enhanced CMS workspaces, go to Workspace Sharing in the workspace settings menu. Then find the shared content in the Shared with Workspaces folder. You can learn more about workspace sharing in Salesforce Help.

CMS workspaces and enhanced CMS workspaces are compatible with the same types of channels, but there are a few exceptions. The B2C Commerce Page Designer, non-enhanced public or restricted channels, and existing LWR sites created before Winter ‘23 are compatible with only CMS workspaces. There are also a few minor differences in how you create and manage your content, collections, and translations.

And there you have it! Go forth and enable your content experts with their own CMS workspaces, channels, and sites, and deliver content to your customers far and wide.

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