hippo cms for the enterprise - bloomreach...

Colofon

Author: Oscar Scholten

Get in touch with Hippo: [email protected]

North America: +1 877 414 47 76 (toll free)

Europe: +31 20 522 44 66

Introduction

• In business for over 10 years

• 100% java

• Build by Technical leaders (Apache committers)

• Committed to standard bodies like OASIS & JCR

• Hippo CMS combines the best of both worlds: open source

innovation power and commercial support

Whitepaper

Amsterdam • Boston Follow the Hippo trail: onehippo.com

Hippo CMS for the Enterprise

Table of Contents

1. Hippo Architecture 3

Delivery Tier 4

Repository Tier 4

Content Management Tier 4

Separation of Concerns 5

Multi-lingual and Multi-channel by Design 5

Extensible and Flexible 5

Consolidate Existing Repositories 6

2. Security 7

User and Permission Management 7

Controllable Content Process 7

Security Audits 8

3. Scalability and Failover 8

4. High Performance Content Delivery 9

Page Generation 9

Content Flexibility 10

Site Performance 10

5. Development 11

Rapid Development 11

Automated System Testing 12

Upgradeability 12

Interoperability 12

Web Accessibility 12

Search Engine Optimization 13

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Whitepaper

Hippo Architecture

Hippo CMS is a 100% Java, open source Web Content

Management platform. It uses modern web architectures,

open standards and open source components throughout.

Hippo’s developers are active contributors to many of

the Apache Software Foundation’s components that are

used within the Hippo platform. Several components have

been extended or enriched with Hippo’s own enterprise

level features. In all layers of the architecture, open and

extendable APIs are available for integrating Hippo CMS

into any existing application architecture. We support the

standardization process by actively participating in the

various bodies that govern new open standards and by

presenting regularly at international events.

Hippo CMS is available in two flavors. The Community

Edition, licensed under the Apache License v2, contains

all features for multi-lingual communication across all

channels. The Enterprise Edition provides additional

support, tooling and certification on a certified stack. It

also gives access to additional features and the Relevance

Module for more personalized customer experiences.


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Reporting

Enterprise Edition Community Edition

Global Support

Upgrade Tooling

Service Manager

EnterpriseFeatures

Enterprise Infrastrucure

Enterprise architecture

Insurance & Indemnification

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Relevance

Content Power

M O B I L E

Channel Control

Rapid Development

Open Integration


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Hippo CMS UI

Hippo API

Hippo Repository

Hippo API

Hippo Delivery Tier

JSP & FTL

M O B I L E

The Hippo architecture is very modular. This modular and

clean architecture has several technical benefits such as

ease of integration and great scalability, and also functional

benefits such as content reuse. In the next sections, details

are provided on each componant in the Hippo stack.

Delivery Tier

The Hippo Delivery Tier provides the tools for rapid

development of websites, mobile sites and other channels

such as REST endpoints in a Hippo CMS environment. It

can be used to quickly realize multi-site and multi-channel

front-ends through a combination of configuration and

development.

Features include a templating engine which is easily

configurable through the Hippo CMS user interface, and a

tag library and expression language to accommodate the

development of a view layer based on JSP or Freemarker

templating. The Delivery Tier has extensive freetext search

and faceted navigation capabilities built-in based on Lucene,

but can also easily integrate with external search engines

such as SOLR or Elasticsearch.

Repository Tier

At the core of Hippo CMS is the Hippo Repository. All

content, metadata and configuration is stored in this

central component. Next to providing a storage layer,

the Repository is also responsible for the base CMS

services such as meta-data and workflow driven content

management, content searching, versioning, processing,

scheduling, transformation and aggregation.

The foundation of Hippo Repository is Apache Jackrabbit,

an open source implementation of JCR specifications

JSR-170 and JSR-283. All content and CMS functionality

is exposed through a standard set of API interfaces. This

allows any application or process to integrate with the CMS

for automatic creation, import, export and publication of

content, next to the web based CMS UI.

Content Management Tier

Hippo CMS is a web application, providing the user

interface through which teams can collaborate to create

and manage their content. All from within the same user

interface, marketers, webmasters, editors and authors can

perform functions such as creating new sub-sites and

landing pages, editing page templates, menu structures and

content, fine-tuning page templates for different targeted

personas, etc. Powerful search functions and clean user

interfaces enable users to quickly perform the different

tasks and stay up-to-date of their colleagues’ progress

using collaboration and reporting functions.

Depending on the role within the organization, certain

functions or content can be made hidden or read only

for certain groups of users, through a centralized access

management system.

The user interface of Hippo CMS has been architected with

customization in mind. It uses a plugin architecture based

on the Apache Wicket web application framework enabling

developers to introduce custom functionality for a specific

project.

<html> <xml>

Separation of Concerns

An important feature of Hippo CMS is that it cleanly

separates content and content management from the

context of its usage and its presentation. Hippo CMS

does not maintain content in a page oriented way, rather

content is stored in a generic structured format, allowing

it to be reused and enriched. The content can be reused

across multiple pages, but more importantly, the content

can be shared across multiple channels and devices.

This allows you to for instance create a new channel

and repurpose all existing content for that new channel,

saving time setting up additional channels, and reducing

maintenance needs later on. Content can be enriched by

adding metadata which is used to further personalize the

experience of for instance a site visitor based on

his context.

Multi-lingual and Multi-channel by Design

Predicting new technology and hot business opportunities

is “a tough thing”. The next device category that we will

use to consume content is hard to predict. A few years

ago, we saw the rise of tablets and smartphones as a new

channel and who can be sure when a new device such as

Google Glasses will take off?

In the previous section, we discussed how Hippo CMS

separates the content from the usage and presentation.

This enables development, content editing and marketing

teams to maximally reuse their work. It is possible to

use the same presentation logic to power multiple sites in

multiple languages. The content editing and marketing

team are now enabled to set up and launch for instance a

new website in a new language without the involvement of

the development or infrastructure teams. Supporting the

content editing team with automated translation tools is

possible as well

The architecture of Hippo CMS allows you to dynamically

add new language variants of your content and sites, or

additional channels through which existing content is

published all from within a production environment.

This ensures you have the flexibility to react to a new

technology or business opportunity when it manifests

itself.

Extensible and Flexible

Hippo CMS lends for integrations in any enterprise

environment. The software itself runs on a wide variety

of application servers and operating systems and can

be easily integrated with other software components in

your architecture. You are able to access and manipulate

the content stored in the CMS repository from other

applications, and at the same time you have the flexibility

to access information stored in other systems from within

the CMS user interface, or from the Delivery Tier.

All content and CMS functionality are exposed through

a standard set of Java APIs. This provides full control

over your content and means any external application

can – with the appropriate permissions – create, import,

export, search, manage, structure, manipulate and publish

content just by using Hippo’s open APIs.

Applications not written in Java can still interface easily

with Hippo. The REST interface opens up your content to

your own non-Java applications, but also to applications

of partners and affiliates. This also enables you to use

a delivery tier of your choosing. You can opt for the

Hippo Delivery Tier and use its rich features such as the

Relevance Module, or choose a delivery tier of your own,

based on Spring MVC or non-Java languages such as PHP.

Hippo CMS allows you to create integrations through for

instance REST interfaces with other backend systems


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company with an extraordinarily

stable platform for our busy web

site. And, the system is also very

easy for our users.’

Dennis Valle, Vice President Group Digital

Marketing, Dolce & Gabbana

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or create mash-ups of important data from third party

systems and Hippo content as part of the CMS user

interface. An example is integration with analytics systems

that provide detailed information for each content item in

your repository, enabling content editors to fine tune the

content to their audiences. The Hippo user interface is built

on the Apache Wicket framework, which makes extending

it with custom CMS UI widgets a pretty straightforward

task.

Similarly, the Hippo Delivery Tier is built around an

easily extensible component framework. This allows you

to create integrations with your backend systems and

use the information stored in those systems to power

your channels.

Above you’ll find an architecture diagram of some of the

typical integrations we see in our at our customers.

Consolidate Existing Repositories

Another common integration scenario is one where there

are already one or more content repositories that need to

be consolidated into a centrally managed CMS. For these

scenarios, Hippo is a perfect fit as you can easily hook in

the other repositories or search engines such as SOLR to

repurpose and enrich the content as if it was native to the

Hippo repository. This means that migrating to Hippo can

be done progressively, at your own pace and without the

need for a “big-bang” content migration.

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Mobile & Tablet Apps

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External Content Sources

CRM Systems

Weather Collector

Shopping Cart & Checkout

Forms, Polls & Surveys On-Site Search

Login Functionality Analytics Connectors

CRM Data Collector

Your Custom Data Point

Your 3rd Party System

Video, Kiosks & Displays

Marketing Automation

Web Analytics Solution

Partner & Affiliate Sites

eCommerce Solutions

Search Engine

Relevance Module

Hippo Delivery Tier

Hippo API

Hippo Repository

Hippo CMS UI

Cloud & Web Services


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7 Security

User and Permission Management

User and permission management is a very important

aspect of any type of enterprise software. For CMS

systems this aspect needs to be split into user and

permission management for site visitors and for CMS

users. Combined, they control which content a site visitor

can see, or which content a CMS user can see or edit.

The Hippo CMS and Delivery Tier share many

components of their technology stack, including many

services related to security. When you use the Hippo

Delivery Tier for your web properties, you will be able to

reuse all standard services that the CMS offers for user

management, authentication and authorization, lowering

the learning curve for your technical teams.

Hippo CMS comes with a number of out-of-the-box

features when it comes to security, such as:

• Role Based Authentication

• Control access by site, section, asset or even

field level

• Integration support for SSO, LDAP and others

• Seamless support for HTTPS both for site and CMS

Typically, the users of the CMS are split into groups,

where each group has their own set of access rights.

These groups, as well as the actual users and their login

credentials are stored in the repository. Next to storing

this information in the repository, it is also possible to

perform authentication against external systems. This

allows you for instance to reuse an external LDAP or

Active Directory system to authenticate users, removing

the need to create and maintain a copy of all user

information in the CMS.

Hippo uses an extensible security mechanism allowing

for very flexible integration with external authentication

and authorization services. The CMS and site applications

can authenticate users using Form Authentication,

JAAS, Spring Security Integration, or use a custom

implementation. Hippo CMS comes with a standard set of

security providers to connect to several types of external

systems, but also allows you to create your own security

providers.

In case a SSO solution is preferred, HTTPD or another

reverse proxy is configured and used to redirect

browser clients to a central Enterprise SSO server for

authentication. After authentication, the user and his

valid security token are then redirected back.

Controllable Content Process

User authentication and authorization is one piece of

the puzzle of setting up a controllable content process.

Several other features are required in a CMS to support

enterprises in setting up a flexible yet secure content

editing environment.

To support this, Hippo CMS has the following

capabilities:

1. Workflow Provides control on the content editing process.

The out-of-the-box workflow in Hippo CMS enables

you to set up a cycle in which content authors

prepare content, which is then checked by a second

team before it is published to the live channels.

More complex workflow scenarios, like 3-step

legal validations, can be easily setup using Hippo’s

extensible workflow mechanism.

2. Collaboration tools and reports

Gives insight into the content editing process. Hippo

CMS comes out-of-the-box with a number of reports

that enable teams to track the content creation

progress.

3. Version history

Provides an audit trail. The version history can be

used to revert to a previous version to see which user

created or published which content, or to see which

user created or published which content.

4. Embargo content

Creates team independence. Hippo CMS supports

multiple teams creating so-called embargo content,

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content that must only be visible to a certain team,

until it is published.

5. Locking and Unlocking

Locks allow an editor to take complete ownership

of a piece of content or a page template. Combined

with version comparison this prevents authors from

overwriting each other’s changes.

Security Audits

Hippo regularly asks external agencies to conduct security

audits for Hippo CMS. These security audits ensure that

the Hippo CMS UI and Delivery Tier comply with the

latest security standards to protect Hippo implementations

against attacks.

Additionally, Hippo has built up and documented a series

of best practices to help prevent vulnerabilities such as

cross site scripting in delivery channels.

Scalability and Failover

System availability is critical for modern web

applications. That is why Hippo CMS can be deployed to

provide a setup with no single point of failure, allowing the

whole system to remain fully functional even in the case of

hardware failure. At the same time, this architecture enables

linear scaling of both the Delivery Tier and the CMS.

When deploying Hippo CMS, the servers are running

the CMS can be split into three logical groups:

• Servers running application servers hosting the Site

application containing the Hippo Delivery Tier, called

Site nodes

• Servers running application servers hosting the CMS

application, called CMS nodes

• Servers running the database used by the repository

In front of both the Site and CMS nodes, one or more

load balancers are typically used to distribute the load

over the individual server nodes. This enables system

administrators to scale the Site and CMS applications

horizontally, as load demands. Note that Site nodes are

generic, it is not necessary for the infrastructure team

to add additional Site nodes when the marketing team

adds additional subsites or channels, or the content team

publishes the site in a whole new language.

Both the Site nodes and the CMS nodes contain

embedded repository applications which are persisted in

a shared database. Depending on the database of choice,

several mechanisms are typically available to make the

database itself resilient to hardware failure as well.


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Advanced Infrastructure


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High Performance

Content Delivery

Page generation

At a 30.000 foot level, all CMS systems can be divided

into two categories: baking systems and frying systems.

These terms relate to when the page presentation logic

is executed to render out pages in HTML or any other

markup language. Baking style rendering systems

generate the HTML output at the moment a piece of

content is published. Frying systems on the other hand

generate the HTML on the fly the moment a particular

page is requested.

Hippo CMS is a frying system, and has been so for over 10

years; our architecture is optimized for this use case.

The benefits of this architecture include:

• Optimal personalization

To be able to offer a truly personalised web

experience, a CMS that “fries” webpages instead

of “baking” them is a must have. All the user’s

characteristics including location, past visits,

current date and time, etc. can then be taken into

account when rendering a page.

• Flexible template changes

As page presentation logic is stored independently

from content, changes to the page presentation logic

is picked up immediately. In page baking systems,

often all pages have to be re-generated before the

change becomes visible. With a page baking system

it can take up to several hours or days to regenerate

all pages - even when the change was trivial. With

Hippo CMS, such changes can be pushed live

instantly.

Content Flexibility

Hippo strictly separates the editing process from the

presentation logic. Content is stored in a generic format,

allowing it to be reused on multiple pages. But more

importantly, when you want to expand your messaging

into an additional channel, you can repurpose all your

existing content without any effort.

As an example, it is possible to create and publish a single

piece of content, which is then made available over the

regular desktop and mobile channels, but also to mobile

apps, socials, RSS or Atom feeds, and affiliate sites over a

REST API.

Site Performance To create great customer experiences, a website needs

to serve its pages quickly. Many studies have shown

that the faster a website is, the higher the perceived user

experience, and the higher the average time a visitor

spends on it. Ultimately, faster websites lead to higher

conversion rates. Google takes this into account when

ranking websites. It punishes slow websites, and puts

faster websites more to the top of their search results. In

other words, high performance content delivery not only

increases user satisfaction but also improves your SEO

ranking.

A number of strategies are available in combination with

Hippo CMS to improve page loading times. Depending on

the type of project, one or more strategies can be combined.

• Content delivery networks

Hippo CMS integrates with Content Delivery

Networks such as Akamai or Fastly to improve

page loading times. Hippo CMS supports Edge Side

Includes (ESI) for dynamic content rendering in a

CDN network and has several features to simplify

development of sites that use ESI.

• Asynchronous components

In some cases, custom dynamic page components

can make it difficult to cache the complete rendering

of an entire web page. A common example of

such a component is one that displays the three

stores locations closest to the current visitor.

These types of components can be configured to

be rendered not as part of the whole page, but

through a separate client side Ajax call. Using this

mechanism, the page without the “uncacheable

component” can still be served from the cache.


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Configuring the use of this mechanism is simply

toggling a checkbox in the configuration of the

component.

• Built-in cache for personalized sites

The Hippo Delivery Tier includes a built-in

cache for hot-spot pages such as the home pages

and landing pages. This caching mechanism is

integrated with the Hippo targeting engine allowing

these hot-spot pages to be served from the cache

while also containing targeted and personalized

content.

The section “Scalability and failover” also covers the

scalability aspects of the Hippo Delivery Tier.

Development

Hippo CMS employs proven development frameworks

to make your applications fast, scalable and extensible

without risk to your entire solution. Being a 100% Java,

open source platform, with a clean consistent architecture

it enables your developers to be productive fast and allows

you to grow your online business with our platform for

many years to come. In previous sections we discussed

the extensibility of the product itself, and the fact that

you as a user have great flexibility in the Delivery Tier.

In this section, we will cover several other aspects of

development using Hippo CMS.

Rapid Development

A web environment is a living thing that needs to innovate

to stay appealing and relevant to its audiences. You need

to be able to add channels, configure targeting rules

or introduce new features in a live environment. A key

component is the flexibility of Hippo in adapting to your

development process and the tooling Hippo CMS offers

to support you in bringing innovations to your audiences

quickly.

M O B I L E

Applications & Offline Channels

Web Mobile

SocialAffiliates and Partners

Hippo Repository

Content Repurposing & Channel Management

Hippo CMS


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Development

Test

Acceptance

Production

configuration & code

content & configuration

Many of our customers use a traditional structure for their

development environment with separate Development,

Test, Acceptance and Production environments. Hippo

CMS accommodates this setup and provides tooling to

assist in moving configuration up the chain towards the

Production environment, and also to move content and

configuration downward in the chain.

This enables teams to quickly progress new features from

Development to Production, but also to use content and

configuration from the Production system on for instance

the Acceptance environment. Many of our customers are

using continuous deployment to further streamline the

development and testing processes.

Automated System Testing

Testing plays a crucial role in the successful

implementation and maintenance of digital experience

platforms. Hippo’s Quality Assurance Essentials give

testers and developers a framework of tools to create and

run automated testing scenarios in an easy, standardized

manner.

This framework runs in a Continuous Integration Server

to facilitate regular scheduled testing as part of standard

maintenance and roll-out protocols and provides

reporting, monitoring and notification functionality.

Based on the Cucumber framework and maintained by

Hippo, the QA Essentials enable testers and developers to

collaborate on creating test scenarios and improve overall

team efficiency.

Upgradeability

Hippo uses the following version numbering scheme:

Maintenance updates are fully backward compatible with

earlier updates within that release. For example: 7.8.1 can

be used as a drop-in replacement for 7.8.0.

If a project wants to upgrade from for instance 7.7 to 7.8,

we supply tooling and documentation to support this

process. In general, upgrading is always possible from a

functional perspective, but in the event of an API change,

implementation code changes may be required.

Interoperability

Hippo is a 100% Java, 100% open standards CMS. This

means you have a lot of flexibility when integrating with

Hippo. We support many current standards such as

JCR, WebDAV, REST, CMIS, and are actively involved in

emerging standards such as WEMI.

Web Accessibility

For many organizations compliance with accessibility

guidelines, such as WCAG, is not only a best-practice –

it’s a legal requirement. Using Hippo CMS organizations

can ensure that their websites will conform to such

accessibility guidelines.

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VERSION NAME DEFINITION FREQUENCY

7 Major version number Hippo CMS product version number 7 Every several years

7.8 Minor version number The 7.8 release of Hippo CMS Once or twice a year

7.8.3 Maintenance version number Maintenance update of the 7.8 release Monthly

What does compliance to Web Accessibility mean? There

are detailed requirements for each of the international

compliance guidelines, but for illustrative purposes, some

of the larger issues include:

• Page requirements

Websites must be readable by electronic screen readers;

• Image requirements

Images must have alt tags (meta information) that will

alternatively identify the image for screen readers;

• Table requirements

If web designers utilize tables of information, alt tags

must describe both column and row headers so that it

can be readable and understandable without visual cues;

• Automatic Scripting

Any scripted display and/or image mapping should

offer text based alternatives.

Hippo CMS can conform to these guidelines as our

architecture gives designers full flexibility in designing the

website. This is one of the many benefits of the Separation

of Concerns that Hippo enforces.

The Hippo Delivery Tier does not impose restrictions on

the HTML layout nor will you find hidden HTML tags

needed for certain features of the CMS. Next to this,

Hippo CMS allows the use of content validators that

report which pages may not conform to certain guidelines,

allowing you to progressively improve your content when

new accessibility rules have to be imposed.

For more details, we have a separate whitepaper on

managing accessible websites.

Search Engine Optimization

Although this is the last section of this whitepaper, Search

Engine Optimization is something that needs to be

considered in a project from the get-go. This is why Hippo

CMS provides documentation and tooling around the

topic of SEO.

Hippo CMS ships with many tools to help optimize your

web channels:

• Full control over URL format, HTML headers, etc.

• Tools for XML sitemap generation, broken links

checking, redirects, etc.

• Link management tools such as broken links

and re-directs

In a separate whitepaper, we provide several best

practices for Search Engine Optimization.

About Hippo


Whitepaper

At Hippo, we believe, digital is here to make our lives a

little bit better.

Hippo sets the standard for how organizations can bring

real-time relevanceto their audience and is the foundation

for personalized experiences across all channels: mobile,

social and web. Our purpose is to facilitate innovation so

our customers can create digital miracles. We serve our

customers, by creating a platform that is fun to use, easy

to implement and open for innovation.

Hippo CMS is a powerful, enterprise-class foundation

to deliver outstanding Customer Experiences based on

Enterprise Agility and Innovation Power.

Hippo CMS is open source, 100% Java and convinces

with its lean product architecture that is built for uptime,

security and performance.

Our dedicated, Certified Partner Network delivers Hippo

Awesomeness around the globe to our valued customers.

Hippo is proud to serve organizations such as Autodesk,

British Telecom, Dolce & Gabbana, the Dutch Police, Bell

Aliant, Weleda and Crédit Agricole.

Hippo is headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

and Boston, USA.

Curious for more? Visit www.onehippo.com

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