Salesforce CMS is a hybrid Content Management System. It was announced in Dreamforce ’19 and is generally available from Winter ’20. You can create and manage content from a single location, then use that in multiple places. It allows you to share content across communities, create content on Community by Community basis, and assign access roles to users to control who creates the content. It is available in both Lightning and Visualforce + Tabs Communities.
Salesforce CMS Starter
All standard Salesforce licenses include CMS starter pack. With a starter pack, you can create up to 500 content records, 20 custom content types (apart from the default News type) and have up to 50 GB of content served in a year. If your organization needs more then additional allowances are available as enhancements to your license.
Salesforce CMS Process
Managing content using CMS is a four-step process. You start with creating content, then share that content with Communities. Organize the Content with Tags, Collections, and finally display content in the Community.
CMS Connect
CMS Connect allows you to bring existing content from an external Content Management System such as Drupal, WordPress, AEM, Sitecore, SDL, etc. It removes the need to copy the content again in your Community. This way you can have consistent branding across multiple locations and provides ease of maintenance.
CMS Content Type Creator
Salesforce provides a default “News” content type. However, you can also create your own custom content types. As of the Summer ‘20 release, content type creation is done programmatically, using the Metadata API. The CMS Content Type Creator (an AppExchange package from Salesforce Labs) allows you to create, clone, and delete custom CMS content types through an intuitive graphical UI based in Salesforce Lightning Experience.
Getting Started with Salesforce CMS
Salesforce CMS is a useful feature if you want to display contents on your community. If you have been using custom objects, lightning components, and/or visualforce pages for the same, follow this guide and find out in the next 45 minutes if using Salesforce CMS can be a better option.
Here’s what this guide covers
- Prework
- Create a CMS Workspace
- Create Content
- Organize Content
- Add Content to Community
- Create Custom Content Types
References & Useful URLs:
- CMS Basics – Trailhead Module (35 mins) – https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/modules/salesforce-cms-basics
- Start Using CMS – Help Article (10 mins) – https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=community_managed_content_start_using.htm&type=5
- CMS Workspaces – Help Article (15 mins) – https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=cms_cmsworkspace_overview.htm&type=5
- Create Content – Help Article (15 mins) – https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=community_managed_content_content_creation.htm&type=5
- Translate Content – Help Article (15 mins) – https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=cms_translations_overview.htm&type=5
- Organize Content – Help Article (15 mins) – https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=community_managed_content_organizing_content.htm&type=5
- Add Content to Your Community – Help Article (15 mins) – https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=community_managed_content_adding_to_site.htm&type=5
- CMS Connect – Help Article (15 mins) – https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=communities_cms_connect.htm&type=5
Change Log:
- Dec 2020 – Updated the Screenshots as per Winter ‘21 Release
- Jan 2020 – First Published
Hi Ashish, very nice and detailed article.
I have one basic use case which i am struggling to get answer for.
We cannot share CMS content to users with only “Customer Community” License. And then my use case is about showing content like Short videos etc, only to users who are added to a custom object.
The custom object is linked to Users via Sharing set.
I am not even sure if Salesforce CMS is the correct use case. So any suggestions?
Thanks Chellappa. Glad to know that you liked the article. Some research on your question led me to this help article that says that we can personalize the contents using Audience targeting and this can be done on CMS Collections. Here are the steps at the high level
1. Add CMS Collection Component to your Experience/Community Cloud site
2. In properties for the CMS collection, click on Personalize
3. Select the collection name and Audience for which you want to display to CMS collection.
Here is a screenshot of how these steps look like
Hope this helps.
thanks Ashish for keeping it centric and sharing what’s essential to know CMS basics ! 🙂
My pleasure Mohit
Thank you Ashish for this great introduction to Salesforce CMS.
Salesforce CMS + CDN will help us to create a complete solution for communities and content management. Let us see how Salesforce CMS evolves.
Thanks Yusuf. Yes, since Salesforce CMS has just been released, I am sure the subsequent Salesforce releases will add tons of features to this.
Hi Ashish,
I am not having this option enabled “standard_SalesforceCMS” app. This app is not visible in my profile list view (Assigned App) section. Anything i am missing?