Developer 101 - Introduction

What is Agility?

Agility is a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) hybrid true cloud CMS platform. It is built from the ground up on .NET, provides content schema customization, content storage, publishing workflows, and a variety of APIs to connect your websites, apps, and other services.

Agility provides the decoupled architecture benefits of a headless CMS, while also providing utilities to your consuming websites/services that provide the benefits of a traditional CMS.

In a typical headless CMS, you are required to maintain your own client SDK to access the content. Often, this is no easy task as you must account for all sorts features such as accessing and caching content, previewing content and page routing. For .NET websites, Agility provides an Agility.Web framework that handles synchronization of published content, caching, routing, configuration, and more.

Agility is a multi-tenant environment which means that customers are utilizing the same version. Agility's decoupled architecture allows the product team to roll out updates to all customers without affecting their website. Agility handles the administration of the CMS side of things, and leaves customers and developers to focus on building solutions to showcase their content.

What You’ll Learn

This training will cover the basics of getting started developing a website connected to Agility. We will primarily be focusing on Web Content Management and website deployment.  The training has been broken down into a set of labs that will allow you to build on your knowledge as you move through the training.  Once complete, you will have the core skills necessary to develop an Agility based website and deploy it into production.

This course assumes that you have a sandbox, a login to Agility, and the corresponding website source code.

What You’ll Need

To complete the labs in this training course, you’ll need to have a Sandbox Sample Site setup for you and have a copy of the site source code. Our current Sandbox Sample Site is a .NET 4.0 site using ASP.NET MVC 4.

You will need to have access to an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) such as Visual Studio. If you don't have a Professional or Enterprise license, you can still use the free Community Edition.

Finally, you’ll need a web browser with an internet connection to access the Agility Content Manager. The Agility Content Manager supports all modern browsers.

How to Get Set Up

If you haven’t done so already, contact our support@agilitycms.com or submit a request to get a Sample Site set up. We’ll send you a download link where you can get the source code for your sample site. 

Once you’ve got the source files, select the .sln Solution File to open the project in Visual Studio. The site will automatically be configured to connect to your Sample Site instance and will be running in Development Mode using IIS Express. Click “Start Debugging” or “Start without Debugging” to run your site locally in your favourite web browser.

Video - How to run a Project Locally

Site Walkthrough

Once you have the Sample Site running locally, click the “Start Tour” link found in the footer of the site. This will launch a guided tour taking you through some basics of how this site is put together.