ContactPlatform architecture & product development
Bringing thousands of partner websites onto a shared platform—and giving the people behind them a simpler way to work.
The challenge
Solvisse is a dotCMS implementation partner.
For a large U.S. retail organization, modernizing its partner websites meant solving two problems at once: managing a brand at scale and giving each partner control over their own presence.
The central team needed to maintain shared content, layouts and brand standards. Partners—from individual operators to larger teams—needed to update their own information and publish content relevant to their customers.
Solvisse worked alongside dotCMS and the client’s internal team to bring those responsibilities together. The work spanned product design, content architecture, development, integrations and quality assurance.
A separate copy of everything on every website would make change difficult to manage. Giving every partner the same editing access would introduce a different problem: too much complexity for everyday updates.
We designed the platform around clear ownership. The brand team maintains the common foundation. Partners manage defined areas of their own websites. Both work with the same underlying content platform.
The platform
dotCMS became the central content repository. Brand managers use it to maintain global assets, templates and shared components.
For partners, we built PartnerCMS: a dedicated application that works with dotCMS through its APIs. It presents the tasks a partner needs, while keeping the underlying content structure behind the scenes.
Individual domains. A consistent foundation.
The partner experience
The original CMS interface exposed choices that partners did not need. Even a small change required navigating a system designed for a different kind of user.
PartnerCMS replaces that complexity with focused editors for articles, banners, tiles and profile information. A partner chooses the content they can edit, makes a change, previews it and follows the publishing flow.
Approved components and formatting rules guide the interface. Behind it, the application checks permissions, validates changes and scopes access to the partner’s own content.
The partner-facing experience relies on a set of deliberate engineering choices. Each keeps common rules in one place while allowing individual sites to evolve.
Each partner site has its own dotCMS host. Core and Shared hosts supply common layouts and reusable content. Request handling presents that content in the context of the partner’s domain, without duplicating the underlying assets.
An Angular frontend connects to a Spring WebFlux backend. Integration with the client’s identity platform, endpoint-level roles and content validation enforce who can change what. Archiving provides a controlled alternative to immediate deletion.
Brand-specific seed sites provide the initial pages and structure. Scheduled integrations populate partner identity and configuration. Shared headers and footers are cached for reuse across platforms.
What the work made possible
The resulting system supports thousands of partner websites, with centralized governance and a dedicated experience for the people maintaining each site.
Brand managers retain control of shared content and design. Partners can manage the content that belongs to them without having to understand the CMS architecture. New sites start from a common foundation rather than a separate implementation.
The project brought product design and engineering together: the boundaries defined in the architecture became clear, usable choices in the application.
Published on dotCMS, these three articles by Solvisse’s Adriel Alfaro and Maikel Pereira explain the strategy, architecture and application in more detail.
The scope, the team and the decision to build PartnerCMS.
dotCMS · The architectureHosts, content models, rendering and site provisioning.
dotCMS · The applicationThe editing experience and the engineering behind it.