by Janus Boye
Ivo Lukac from Netgen together with Janus Boye (left) and Jake DiMare right at the Web Summer Camp 2018.
It’s been over a decade since Berlin-based industry analyst Tim Walters famously said
Content is king. Context is everything
While focusing on delivering good content and blazing-fast websites, buyers of content technology like content management systems or digital experience platforms has witnessed a dizzying level of innovation, new start-ups entering the crowded marketplace, and a neverending list of new terms like headless and JAMstack. It’s been quite far from the consolidation and commoditization predicted by analysts.
Some vendors have focused primarily on improving the authoring experience. To be honest, there’s still plenty of room for improvement in terms of getting content into the system. At the same time, many vendors have focused on the delivery part, making your website fast and accessible. Some with a more technical focus, others more from a marketing perspective.
What few have done, is looking at what I would call the middle ground. The actual composition of the experience. Deciding what content goes where, how the different blocks are placed together, reused and ordered. It’s the key to composing the best digital experience and Croatian digital agency Netgen has taken a stab at making it easier with Layouts - an innovative tool. Let’s take a closer look
Introducing Netgen Layouts
In the words of Netgen:
Netgen Layouts enables you to build and manage complex web pages in a simpler way and with less coding
Layouts was introduced back in July 2019 as version 1.0 as an open core product. It was a big step after almost 4 years of development, 40+ implementations and supporting first early adopters. The preview option was a big news in version 1.1, which was released in December 2019
As usual with new tools trying to address a problem that’s still not widely understood, the positioning can be tricky. Ivo Lukac from Netgen has tried with LBMS (layout and block management) which looks to be a bit too specific term and with all the headless buzz, he arrived at H4H (head for headless) which sounds more generic Deane Barker defines it as CPMS (content providers management system).
When I spoke to Ivo, the key problem that Netgen recognised was that while many other framework exists, but they often limit you. They wanted to enable non-developers to do routine changes on the website without losing flexibility for building more complex features. In brief: Better for users and easier for makers.
On the screenshot below you can see how the block management of a layout looks like in the Layouts admin interface:
A look inside the interface where you can arrange and compose the digital experience
On the below screenshot you can see how layouts are mapped to URLs and how its possible to condition those mapping based on the context:
Notice the conditions to the right
How about licensing and pricing?
Layout comes in two editions:
Open source version with community support
Commercial version with a support subscription
Commercial features include having more people in the team, high traffic and more languages. Also the open source edition has 2 hardcoded roles (admin & editor). In commercial version you can fine-grain that.
Finally, there are also differences when it comes to block-level changes & automation.
In terms of pricing, the support subscription which includes the commercial features starts from 4,000 eur per year for a typical project, additional discounts possible through the Netgen partner network.
What’s the impact?
You might wonder why so few have focused on the composition given that it’s such an important part of the experience. To be fair, many of the traditional vendors, call them suites or monoliths, like Adobe and Sitecore, has done much in recent years inside their systems to both have less boring work for developers and make it easier for non-developers to make changes.
I spoke to Norwegian digital agency Labs (previously Keyteq), which has worked with Layouts for almost 2 years in customer projects. Stine Vinnes has looked closer in her role as heading up development and design at Labs and she said::
To us, Layouts is a tool which makes users (both us as an agency and the customers) and editors more efficient and independent. Layouts can also contribute towards creating a better experience for end users as pre-defined objects and blocks can ensure a more consistent implementation of the corporate identity and the design elements.
Still, Layouts from Netgen is one of few vendors to offer a specific software solution to this. Frontastic is another one and they position themselves as:
Frontend-as-a-Service for your headless CMS and commerce systems
Frontastic just released a brand new editor and also hired Peter Sunna as product manager just last month. Peter previously headed product at Contentful for almost 5 years and prior to that 5 years in a similar role at Episerver. Clearly there’s momentum and potential at the junction of content acquisition and delivery.
Learn more about the rapidly evolving CMS marketplace
Ivo Lukac wrote a popular post on Headless possibilities in September 2020. Earlier this year, we also had a relevant member conference call with Preston So on A New Grand Compromise In Content Management.
You might also want to dive into these 2 related posts by Deane Barker:
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