How To Start Developing With Agility CMS | Agility CMS Docs

Developing with Agility CMS

Agility CMS is built to be flexible and powerful so you can design a solution that suits your needs.

Being a Headless CMS, there are infinite ways to integrate with Agility CMS. Agility handles storing your content, providing a UI to manage it, and APIs to access it. 

You develop and deploy your website (or app, IoT device, etc.) outside of Agility and pull-in content using our platform SDKs or REST API. 

You can build and deploy your digital solution in any framework, on any platform. Your content and where it is displayed is entirely decoupled.

Agility CMS digital solution framework

Content Architecture

In order to retrieve Agility content via the API, you must have content set up in your instance that you can query. We call this process of setting up your content and pages Content Architecture.

Think of this as defining what fields your editors will need for each type of content.

This includes:

  • Setting up Content Models - Content Models represent the structure for a type of content. You can then initialize lists of content based off a model that you can query with the API.
  • Setting up Pages Modules - These are the components that editors can add to pages so they can control what content (and order) will display on a page. Page Modules are similar to Content Models in that they are comprised of fields, but they can only be added to pages.

Page Modules typically correspond to frontend components in a website that will render HTML templates with the content from the CMS.

Accessing Content

Once you have content set up and some pages with some modules on them, you are ready to start retrieving content from the CMS to integrate into your solution.

Agility builds and maintains a variety of different ways to access content including framework specific SDKs to make it even easier to get your content.

  • Using a Framework/Starter
  • Using an SDK
  • Using the REST API with any programming language

Deploying your Solution

Agility CMS is always hosted and maintained by Agility CMS, but you can build a deploy your digital solution anywhere.

Agility has some built in hosting integrations with Vercel and Netlify that can make it even easier to deploy your website and set up a content preview.