Get started with Spire CMS
Optimizely Configured Commerce Spire CMS is both a CMS and a reference site. Spire is built on React/Redux and lets you use widgets to construct pages and APIs to retrieve data with the JavaScript framework. With Spire CMS, you can customize and maintain your site faster and more easily.
Benefits of Spire CMS
Spire CMS offers several benefits for creating and maintaining your ecommerce site:
- Modern architecture – Is built on React/Redux with an optimized CMS data structure to improve load times, maintain a lighter JavaScript payload, and provide a lower learning curve for developers.
- Enhanced page editing – Features an updated column design for flexible page layouts, configurable widgets for low-code/no-code flexibility, and the ability to create layouts for frequently used page types.
- Improved content management – Has advanced publishing options, such as page-specific content for different languages and contexts, page restoration with version comparison, and flexible tagging for easier content organization and retrieval. It also centralizes shared content.
- Optimized SEO – Supports server-side rendering and provides guidelines to ensure search engine crawlers see the same content as users, contributing to improved search engine optimization.
- Better accessibility – Is designed with WCAG 2.0 AA guidelines for easier accessibility certification for storefront pages and components.
- Core Web Vitals improvements – Significantly increases Google's performance scores for pages and components out of the box. See Understand Core Web Vitals for information.
- Site-wide styling control – Uses a configurable Style Guide for centralized site-wide styling changes and the ability to revert to blueprint defaults.
- Simplified data structure – Features a simple CMS data structure for easier management.
- Device preview – Provides quick links for device previews (mobile, tablet, and desktop) to understand page appearance without manual resizing.
- Blueprints – Offers blueprints for enhanced customization and extension.
Support for Classic
Because all customers can now use the Spire CMS, Classic CMS has reached its end-of-life, as of January 1, 2025.
Configured Commerce customers can implement Spire-based sites on the same instance as their existing Classic-based sites. With the v5.1 SDK release in January 2022, on-premises customers can also utilize Spire. Learn more about migrating your Configured Commerce site from Classic to Spire.
Feature parity between Classic and Spire
The sites differ in how features are implemented, but they support the same Configured Commerce feature sets. If you already have a highly customized site, you must manually integrate new features.
Feature/Capability | Classic CMS | Spire CMS |
|---|---|---|
Technology | Angular.js, Foundation, TypeScript | React, Redux, TypeScript, Node |
Front end upgrade model | Merge as desired | Automated |
Styling approach | Cascading Style Sheets, base.css | Style Guide, user-configurable, styled-components |
Structure by website | Themes | Content Library |
Server/front-end load | Heavy front end, API-only on back end | Hybrid, some on front end mixed with some on back end |
Widget construction | Custom created | Built on Mobius and then customized |
Widget code | C#/TypeScript | TypeScript |
Widget extensibility | New widgets | New widgets, property injection or handler chain |
Widget sizing ? reference site | Larger widgets | Smaller, more granular widgets |
SPA (single-page application) | Yes | Yes |
Supports GTM, Chat, and other JavaScript-based extensions | Yes | Yes |
Build process | Grunt | Webpack |
Hot module replacement | No | Yes |
SEO page for bots | Separate page | No longer needed |
Accessibility | By extension | Reference site includes accessibility features |
Responsive preview | By resizing screen | Toggle to change view |