Create, Curate, 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.
- Curate 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
Sheng, Elle, and Calvin, the Tucker Home Goods content experts, are ready to create some content in the Digital Experiences app. To begin, they craft a blog post about industrial lighting. Follow along in your Trailhead playground.
- In the CMS workspace, click Add | Content.
- Select the News content type, then click Create.
- For the title, enter:
Industrial Lighting. Notice that the content slug is generated automatically based on the title. You can change 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.
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 drafted News content in the content list, click the back arrow.
Get Content Ready for Publish with the Basic Approval Request Workflow
At this point, the team can review and approve the content before publishing by using the Basic Approval Request workflow.
In the Workflows card on the content detail page, Calvin selects Basic Approval Request and clicks Start. When he 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 designated reviewer.
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 their content evolves, Chris, the Salesforce admin can build new, customized workflows by using Flow Orchestration and Flow Builder.
Preview and Publish the Content
Publishing makes the content available to the sites and channels connected to the workspace. To see how the content looks in the LWR site channel, Sheng clicks Preview. He confirms the content is ready to be added to the Tucker Home Goods site and made publicly available. Then he clicks Publish.
Sheng can either publish the content now or schedule a publish date. After the content is published, Chris can add the content to the Tucker Home Goods site and display it for their customers.
We don’t check for published content in the hands-on challenge, but if you’ve been following along in your Trailhead playground, you must first add a channel to your workspace before you can preview or publish content.
Create Custom Content Types
The 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. To do this, Robert uses the CMS Content Type Manager, which is an AppExchange package created by Salesforce Labs.
To start, Robert adds banners, product announcements, and FAQs. 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.
Create a Collection
Collections are groups of content organized around a theme, audience, or whatever organizational scheme you come up with. Use collections to gather items for repeater displays such as a grid of product images on a site page.
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.
In enhanced CMS workspaces, you can create manual or dynamic collections with items of the same content type. Dynamic collections require that a content taxonomy is set up and that content items are tagged. To learn more about dynamic collections, see Manage a Dynamic Collection.
Follow along in your Trailhead playground as Sheng and Elle create a manual collection for the Tucker Home Goods enhanced LWR site.
- In the workspace, click Add | Collection.
- Select Manual Collection and click Create.
- Enter
Lightingfor the title, and for the description, writeContent 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.
- Click Add content to collection.
- Add the Industrial Lighting article, then save your changes.
In the collection editor, Sheng and Elle add news items to the collection and save their changes.
Publish the Collection
To make the collection available to the channel, Sheng clicks Publish.
If the content was available in other languages, Sheng could select which translation languages to publish. In this case, Sheng sees that the collection is related to the three news articles in one language. To publish the 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.
Display a Collection in a Channel
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.
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?
CMS workspaces and enhanced CMS workspaces have several essential features 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 support custom content types, and developers can use the same methods to create and add them. Both workspaces can publish content to enhanced LWR sites, Aura sites, and any public or restricted channel.
What’s different?
But what makes them different? Enhanced CMS workspaces have several 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 don’t publish 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.
- Share and reuse 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 are compatible with B2C Commerce Page Designer and existing LWR sites created before Winter ’23. There are also a few minor differences in how you create and manage your content, collections, and translations between enhanced and non-enhanced workspaces.
And there you have it! Go forth and enable your content experts with their own CMS workspaces, channels, and sites to deliver content to your customers far and wide.