This article is part of our series on Visor. For the full picture, start with The choice behind every website.
Static pages decide how a website reaches its visitors. The CMS decides how the website is run from day to day: who writes the content, who checks it, and how it gets onto the page.
Large organisations need two things from a CMS that pull in different directions. Editors want to get on with their work without waiting for a developer. The organisation wants to know that nothing goes live before the right people have seen it. The Visor CMS is built to give both.
Approval steps you draw yourself
Every organisation signs off content in its own way. In Visor, that process is a workflow: the stages content moves through, such as Draft, Review, Approved, and Published, and the actions between them, such as Submit, Approve, and Reject.
Admins draw the workflow on a canvas by dragging stages and actions into place, then assign it to the kinds of content it covers. One workflow can cover several kinds of content, and a rule can send some items down a different path. A product disclosure can go to the legal team while a news item goes only to an editor.
Every page and entry shows which stage it is at, and editors move it along the paths the workflow allows. When the process changes, the admin changes the drawing. No code is involved.
A record of every change
Drafts are kept as versions. Once an entry is published it is locked, and editing it opens a new version that goes live when it is published again. Publishing starts a new build of the site, and Visor logs what was queued, each build that ran, and when.
Ready-made building blocks for pages
Editors build pages from widgets: ready-made blocks such as banners, cards, statistics, accordions, and search. They drag a widget into place on the page, open its settings, and choose what it shows.
Developers build each widget once and register it, and editors can use only the widgets that have been registered. That keeps every page within the site's design, however many people are editing. Before publishing, editors preview the page through the real site, with its real design.
Every site starts with seven layouts and more than 40 widgets from the Visor template, and teams add their own beside them.
Content entered once, used in many places
A website does more than show fixed text. It lists news, shows events, compares products, and answers questions. Visor's data functions hold that kind of information as structured content. Editors fill in a simple form, and one entry can appear in a listing, on its own page, and in search results.
Articles, for news, blog posts, case studies, and media releases, are ready to use. An admin can add other kinds of content, such as events or courses, with their own fields and their own workflow. Editors can start using them with no new code.
Built-in search covers that content too, across several kinds of content at once, with no outside search service to run.
Who can do what
Roles and permissions decide who can edit what. In an organisation with many sites, editors see and create content only for the site they are working on, and permissions can limit people to their own sites.
In short
The Visor CMS lets editors build pages and publish content without asking a developer, using registered building blocks and simple forms. Approval steps, versions, and permissions are part of the platform, so control doesn't depend on people remembering the rules.
Read more: The choice behind every website, Using AI to build and change websites on Visor, and Running fifty websites like one.
