HubSpot announced its new Content Optimization System (COS) today at Inbound 2013. HubSpot's COS offers radical improvements over HubSpot's previous content management system (CMS). In celebration of HubSpot's new COS, LyntonWeb is pleased to announce the release of its new website built on HubSpot's new COS. Here are our first thoughts on the new COS....
The most striking thing about the new HubSpot COS is its template builder. It’s a template builder easy enough for non-technical marketing folks to use yet sophisticated and powerful enough for developer geeks to love. Huge improvement and way to go HubSpot!
Templating System - a simple user interface allows you to setup styles and layouts easily that even non-technical folks can modify and create new ones
Global Content - global groups (a group of global modules) and global modules can be saved and re-used on multiple pages. If you need to change content in a global group or a global module you simply change it in one place and that change will cascade across your entire website. This is very useful for headers, footers, sidebars, blocks of text next to a form, or even styled social media icons. For example, on our new LyntonWeb.com website, all the items in the page footer are part of a global group that can be easily updated in one location.
HTML Flexibility - the template editor in the new HubSpot COS offers much more control over your HTML by allowing you to add CSS classes and IDs to your modules. You can also go beyond HubSpot’s visual editor and work directly in the template code and create whatever custom structure you prefer. In the old HubSpot CMS you were limited by the specific template you were using and it was difficult to give unique styles to pages in the HubSpot CMS. In the new COS it’s much, much easier because of the visual editor and the ability to easily add CSS classes.
Responsive Design - The new HubSpot COS uses the grid system from the Twitter Bootstrap framework which allows you to quickly build responsive websites. Given the fast move to mobile and the use of widely varied devices and screen sizes this ability is critical.
Jinja! - You may not know Jinja - but the new HubSpot COS lets you use features of this template language to store things like brand and link colors or fonts in your styles (yes we are hardcore geeks). Also, Jinja automatically minifies your styles which helps your website performance. ‘
As you would expect from the braniacs over at HubSpot, they are constantly making the new COS even more awesome. We’ll be sure to keep you posted on all the cool new features we are using.