Optimizely Content Graph

Shareable stakeholder previews on Optimizely SaaS CMS (headless): login-free links to unpublished content, and how they work

August 21, 2026August 21, 2026 nikkipunjabi Leave a comment

Letting someone outside the Optimizely CMS review a page before it goes live sounds like a setting you switch on. It is not one. Optimizely SaaS does not ship this out of the box, and on a headless build you have to develop it yourself. It is a small feature with a fair amount going on underneath, and it matters more to the business than its size suggests.

Here is how it works, what I got wrong, and the decisions worth making early.

The request

A few weeks before go-live, someone always asks:

“Can you send a link so they can see the page before we publish it?”

The reviewer is usually a legal contact, a brand manager, or a client sponsor. They will not get a CMS account, they will not be trained, and they will open the link on their phone.

The CMS preview pane with the page still in Draft. This is the built-in author preview.

Semantic Search with Optimizely Graph – a Practical Guide

July 29, 2026July 29, 2026 nikkipunjabi Leave a comment

Optimizely Graph ships with semantic search built in. No vector database, no embedding pipeline, no second index to keep in sync – you add one argument to a GraphQL query and you get vector search over your CMS content.

That’s a genuinely big deal, and it’s why I didn’t reach for pgvector one of the demo project. So I built site /search page that understands what people mean, is 100% server-rendered, URL-driven, and ships zero client JavaScript.

The good news: it works, and it’s about four lines of GraphQL. The interesting news: my first three attempts at verifying it worked were all measuring the wrong thing, and the fix for the biggest problem isn’t in any documentation I could find.

Bridging Optimizely CMS and Angular with BFF Pattern

July 14, 2025July 15, 2025 nikkipunjabi Leave a comment

Introduction

We recently worked on an Angular-based project where the front-end team was developing in a micro-front-end architecture—completely isolated from the back-end and with no exposure to Optimizely CMS. Their world revolved around Angular development and independently deployed micro-front-end applications.

Our challenge was to introduce Optimizely as the CMS backbone for content authoring and to manage the content tree structure. We needed a foundational architecture that allowed both front-end and back-end teams to work productively and in parallel across sprints—without stepping on each other’s toes.

Connecting Optimizely CMS 12 DXP to Angular Front-End Using BFF