XIN Mods fit the bigger picture
What XIN Mods provides is a mature CMS platform (Bloomreach XM) adjusted to be more in tune with whatever frontend technology you might be using to interface with your users, making it truly headless. It does this by implementing a functionally rich CaaS (Content as a Service) layer on top of the excellent Bloomreach XM APIs.
XIN Mods makes it so that your CMS isn't the center of the universe, instead it will simply a cog in a larger machine.
Powerful REST APIs extensions connect you to the CMS in an easy to understand way.
In short, the XIN Mods let Bloomreach's Experience Manager fit into the bigger picture of organisations that already have a wealth of infrastructure without requiring the entire ecosystem to bend to its needs.
Why Bloomreach XM?
Bloomreach XM has been around for a long time. The core team responsible for building it is highly skilled and technically excellent. They have based their CMS on an amazing array of Open Source Java technologies that cause it to be stable, flexible and sure to be around for a long time.
Over time, what the CMS can do has increased many times over. However, quite a few of these functions are not necessarily relevant to a large number of potential users, either because they already have other tooling in place that does the same thing, or just because their business isn't ready to think about things like personalization.
In those situations, these functions become a distraction. With that in mind, XIN Mods simplifies how Bloomreach XM is presented to the end user, without sacrificing any of its technical excellence.
A Simpler Bloomreach XM Experience.
XIN Mods takes away some of the complexity introduced by later version of the CMS that are easily managed through other tools (such as the HST, personalization) and really focuses on the amazing data modeling and the authoring interface at its core.
Multi-tenant Document REST API.
The XIN Mods expose a set of new APIs that enable your Application Service (like an ExpressJS application) to query the data in your content repository.
Package Management.
Additionally, a package manager is introduced that allows you to import and export packages. A package is a set of paths and CNDs that are to be exported.
By introducing the concept of packages, the Bloomreach XM instance itself becomes much less valuable — you can easily setup a new instance and reimport the packages in a matter of minutes.
It also alleviates the problems experienced with content having to move between different parts of your infrastructure. Moving code between a development and test server becomes trivial.
Asset modification
A common use-case for a CMS is to store images and be able to serve out multiple renditions of that image. Bloomreach XM has this functionality built-in, but is rather cumbersome to use and difficult to change once you've made up your mind.
To get around this XIN Mods include the /assetmod extension. A simple image operations interpreter that can help: scale, crop and apply other types of filters.
Admin Panels
Include external applications as administration panels in your CMS backend by configuring an iframe component.
AWS Integration
Bloomreach XM can now be hooked up to an AWS SNS topic allowing your downstream systems to listen to changes to content in the CMS. An example where this could come in handy is for intelligent caching strategies.
