Scrivito is a top-tier cloud-based content management solution. All your content is managed in the background, automatically and transparently. No local or server-side database is required, there are no setup or maintenance hassles.

With most websites, whether they are based on PHP or Ruby on Rails, the individual pages are generated by a remote web application on the server side. The most obvious consequence of this concept is that you require remote machinery which needs to be equipped with sufficient computing power and bandwidth to serve the visitors of your website.

In contrast to a website delivered by a server, a JavaScript-based website lives in the visitor’s browser. It’s a client-side web application, so once the JavaScript application code has been downloaded into the browser, no remote computation is required for generating the pages. Their decreased request load makes client-side websites very fast: The response times are shorter, the visitors’ user experience improves.

To deliver the first meaningful paint with lightning speed, the markup of Scrivito-based websites is prerendered, earning them an excellent Google SEO score.

All access to content is handled transparently by the Scrivito SDK. This means that developers do not have to deal with retrieving the data, but can concentrate entirely on the application logic, e.g. for structuring and rendering the various types of content the website contains. The SDK is a JavaScript library that gets included in every Scrivito-based web application. The user interface for editing content directly on the web pages is accessible via edit.scrivito.com.

While content is being produced – i.e. while text is being edited or images are being uploaded –, the SDK transfers it through the Scrivito backend to your CMS. All content is stored safely in the cloud using Amazon Web Services (AWS) such as Cloud Databases or S3.

From the perspective of a website developer, all that needs to be done to have CMS-managed content rendered and made editable on web pages is making an API call to the Scrivito SDK. All rendering is done with React, a component-based technology that makes creating interactive user interfaces easy.

Scrivito’s user interface lets you compose pages using widgets. Widgets can best be thought of as modular pieces of content. You can rearrange widgets on the pages using drag and drop, or copy and paste them, even across pages. The Scrivito Example (Portal) Application comes with many pre-built widget types that are easy to customize or complement with use-case-specific creations.

For managing binary assets, a Content Browser is included that lets you find and modify the different types of content your site is made up of. Images and other binary files can be uploaded using drag and drop.

The SDK also takes care of caching and handles routing; it optimizes the communication between your website and your Scrivito CMS, supports automatic image scaling for mobile devices and offers user-friendly SEO.