SaaS CMS Tips & Tricks #001 - Blueprints

Do you have a lot of content for your website? Wish you're able to magically copy and paste the structure of a page or component easily? Are you guilty of reusing the same layout over and over again?

Here's a hot tip for you, use the blueprints feature in Visual Builder!

What are blueprints?

Blueprints are reusable templates that you can create directly from Visual Builder. You can save existing experiences and sections as blueprints and use them to easily create similar content whenever you want.

Things like a campaign landing page, a contest entry form, a masthead/hero image, column/grid content, any experiences and sections that is in the CMS, you can create a blueprint and create content based off of those them.

How to use blueprints?

From creating blueprints to using them to managing them, let's go through each feature one by one. You can follow along in this interactive demo.

Creating a blueprint

You can create a blueprint from any experience and section with Visual Builder. Creating or saving a blueprint is the same for experience and section, and can be done easily in 4 steps.

1. Open the More (...) menu and select "Save as Blueprint..."
2. Enter a name for the blueprint
3. Select a thumbnail image for the blueprint
   • Default one is generated based on the existing content of the experience/section you are using for your blueprint
   • You can upload your own image
   • Reset will change the thumbnail back to the default one
4. Save

Using blueprints

After creating blueprints, you'll be able to start using them immediately. When you are creating a new experience or adding a new section, you'll be able to see all the blueprints that have been created in the CMS. All you have to do is instead of choosing a "Blank Experience" or "Blank Section", choose the blueprint that you want to use and click "Create Experience" or "Add Section".

Managing blueprints

Within the Settings of the CMS, you'll find a Blueprints section that will allow you to manage all the blueprints. In this section, you'll be able to search by the name of the blueprint, and filter by the type (experience, section, or all). Currently, you can only either rename or delete them, but on the CMS roadmap, we'll soon be improving the UI of this section, as well as adding the functionality of copy and pasting blueprints, and editing blueprints.

Resources

Developer Doc

• Visual Builder: Blueprints- https://docs.developers.optimizely.com/content-management-system/v1.0.0-CMS-SaaS/docs/visual-builder#blueprints

User Doc

• Blueprints - https://support.optimizely.com/hc/en-us/articles/28354742563725
• Save as blueprint - https://support.optimizely.com/hc/en-us/articles/27875431780877-Save-as-blueprint