Terminology Updates

We are making changes to our terminology to better align with industry standards, especially considering that Agility is an API-first, headless CMS platform.

Here is a quick overview of what you can expect to change:

  • Pages -> Layouts
  • Modules -> Components
  • Page Template -> Layout Model
  • Module Zone -> Component Zone
  • Page Modules -> Component Models

Why Make These Changes?

Let's start first with a little bit of history. Agility has always been headless; it has an API that delivers content to the front-end, which is completely separated from the content itself (unlike traditional CMS).

We determined early on that for most customers, the primary front-end is the website. What is a website? Websites are a bunch of pages on a sitemap. What's a page but a set of modular visual elememts that are based on a design system.

Hopefully, those modules can reused.

That's where the current terminology came from, and when we were being compared primarily to traditional CMS platforms, we decided to use "Modules" to represent the content that is needed to render a "Component" and "Page" to represent the metadata that's required to render a page on the website.

Turns out that it's actually really confusing to see see the term "Pages" in a headless CMS.

People are often convinced that Agility isn't actually headless when they see that; it doesn't line up with their expectations. It turns out that the 2023 terminology for what we USED to call "Page Management" is now called "Experience Management" - where a tool allows you to control the layout of visual components and deliver that data via an API to the front-end.

To remove the confusion, we're changing the terminology a bit.

Instead of Pages, we'll be using the term "Layouts." Layouts have a URL, some meta data, and a set of... Components! Components in Agility represent the content needed to render a... Component!

Rounding out the changes, we'll be changing Page Templates to Layout Models, and Module Zones to Component Zones.

Phased Rollout

Our terminology has been around for a long time, and as such, we have a lot of APIs, SDKs and toolkits, not to mention our 2 current UIs. 

We won't be rolling everything out all at once.  Here's the plan:

  • Now: The new UI will be the first to get the changes, starting end of September.
  • Never: The classic UI will NOT be affected.
  • Q4 2023: APIs and SDKs will be updated with new endpoints and versions to support the new terminology. Existing APIs and SDKs will continue to work normally - you do NOT have to update your code to adapt to the new terminology.