Getting to know Digital Experience Manager

March 6, 2023

Digital Experience Manager allows you to update the contents of your different web projects (websites, intranets, extranets). By reading this guide you will quickly learn how to find your way with Digital Experience Manager, and how to create a content before making it available online.

1 How to navigate inside Digital Experience Manager?

Digital Experience Manager is composed of different interfaces with different objectives.

To switch from an interface to another, you need to use the “DX menu” , available in the upper left corner

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Note: Digital Experience Manager administrators have access to the administration interface from this navigation menu. Developers will also find access to the Studio from this menu.

The edit and contribute modes are the privileged interfaces for creating and modifying the contents of a site. The contribute mode is a deliberately restricted interface, simpler than the edit mode. The possibilities for creating contents are more limited than in the edit mode. This interface is preferred for occasional or untrained users. You will find a more detailed description of these modes in the chapter dedicated to the contribute mode and in the chapter dedicated to the edit mode.

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Edit mode

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Contribute mode

My dashboard is your personal space. This is where you can edit your profile, see the list of tasks you can accomplish, find the list of pages you have created, modified or published, and links to any web projects you can contribute to. More information is available on the My dashboard documentation.

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The managers are specific interfaces for managing "out of context" contents, documents, and site contents. The access to these interfaces depends on your roles. More information on managers.

2 Quick content creation

Making a new content, or a modified content, available online is a two steps process: creation or  modification first, then publication. We distinguish several roles for these operations: the editors and contributors who create / modify the contents and request the publication, the "reviewers" who can review the contents before publishing them. The Editor-in-Chief role allows to create and edit contents, as well as publishing them.

Please note that any published content may be unpublished, so as not to be visible online.

Any creation of new content, or update of content, is done in the workspace, also called "default" repository. At this point, additions / changes are not visible in the online version of the site.
Content creation or modification is done from the edit or contribute modes.
Depending on the type of page you are working on, and depending on your role (understand the permissions you have), you can choose from several types of content you can create. This ranges from adding a new page, to adding a simple text, an image, to more structured types of content that are potentially specific to your site.
When the contributor is free to add any type of content, then the button "+Any content" appears:

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which displays the content type selector:

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You can use the search field to filter the types of contents to be displayed in the selector.

The types of content offered may depend on the area of the page in which you will create the content. Therefore, only the buttons corresponding to the authorized types are displayed:

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Only company entries can be created here

Once the type is selected, the corresponding edit form, called “Edit engine” is displayed so that you can fill in the different fields to create your content.

You can edit your content by right-clicking on it and by choosing "Edit" in the contextual menu or directly by double clicking on the content. The edit engine opens, with all the data previously entered.

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Exemple of Edit Engine

You will find more details on creating contents in this page. The edit engine (editing form) is presented in more details here.

Once your content is created or modified, you can preview it by clicking on the “Preview” menu to see what your site will look like once the contents have been published. Several preview options are available to you, choose the one you want.

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3 Content publication

As previously mentioned, newly created or modified contents must be published in order to be visible online. Published contents may be unpublished at any time.

The Publish menu, located on the Contribute Mode toolbar and on the toolbar on the right side of  the Edit Mode, allows you to start a publication:

  • At site level
  • Of a page and its sub-pages
  • Of page contents
  • Of one or more selected contents of a page: for that you must previously click on a content to select it, and if necessary, hold down the "Ctrl" key of your keyboard and click on other contents in order to have a multiple selection.

The publication menu is also present in the context menu (right click) of:

  • Pages
  • Contents of a page

If your site is available in multiple languages, you can choose to publish the content either in the current language or in any language. Please see the publication page for more details.

The publishing interface then displays the number of contents to publish. You can view the list of contents to be published by clicking on "Publication infos", and for each content you can compare the online version to the version to be published.

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Depending on your role, you can either publish the content (s) directly, or you will need to start a publication workflow: it is a multi-step process so that the content is verified by one or more other users before being published and visible online. Before starting a publication workflow, it is advisable to give the workflow a meaningful name from the "Action" tab, changing the value of the "Title" field. It is also possible to write comments.

If you have ignored the workflow, then the publication process is started in the background and your content will soon be online! If you have started a publication workflow, then anyone who can validate this publication request will receive a notification in the Digital Experience Manager interface, and by email if the email notification is enabled.

The number of tasks waiting for a user to do is displayed on the "Workflow" button of the edit and contribute modes:

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By clicking on this button, you will open the workflow dashboard:

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From this interface you can proceed to the review of the contents to be published, by clicking on "Review of content".

The screen now opened is very similar to the publication screen and will allow you to complete or reject the publication.

Once the request for publication is accepted, the publication process of the content will take place in the background and your content will soon be online!

You can access the online version of your site by clicking on the viewing menu, then "Live":

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