Development Environment on Core dna [Video]

Core dna is framework agnostic.

An agnostic framework means you can create any design using the front-end technology and frameworks that you know and love.

We believe in being open-minded and non-discriminatory when it comes to technology choices, and we want our clients to feel empowered to use whatever works best for them and their projects, regardless of whether it's something we've already tried and failed with before! 

Core dna never requires you to use specific templates or libraries. As a decoupled platform, Core dna also has server side templating that can be used to deliver projects quickly and efficiently using only HTML, CSS and Javascript. The server side frameworks supported are Twig and Smarty.

What is an agnostic framework?

An approach to software development that doesn't favor any one language or technology over another. Agnosticism is a philosophical position which states that it is not possible to know anything about God or other supernatural beings. A Software Agnostic approach would say that there is no right or wrong when it comes to the tools you use in your job as long as they get the job done.

What is Smarty?

Smarty is a template engine for PHP. More specifically, it facilitates a manageable way to separate application logic and content from its presentation. This is best described in a situation where the application programmer and the template designer play different roles, or in most cases are not the same person. It is extremely fast. It is efficient since the PHP parser does the dirty work. No template parsing overhead, only compiles once.

What is Twig?

Twig is a modern template engine for PHP. It's fast. Twig compiles templates down to plain optimized PHP code. The overhead compared to regular PHP code was reduced to the very minimum. It is secure. Twig has a sandbox mode to evaluate untrusted template code. This allows Twig to be used as a template language for applications where users may modify the template design. It is flexible. Twig is powered by a flexible lexer and parser. This allows the developer to define its own custom tags and filters, and create its own DSL.

What is a decoupled platform?

A decoupled platform is a software architecture where components are independent of each other. This allows for easier development, testing, and maintenance of the individual pieces that make up the whole product or system.

Decoupled platform advantages: 

A decoupled platform will allow your software to be more easily scalable and upgradable as new technologies become available. It also means your developers won't have to worry about updating multiple parts of your application every time there's an update released; they'll just need to update one piece at a time!

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With ERP systems, there are a number of different data points that you might be interested in passing back and forth. Here are some of the most common:

• Order data
• Shipments
• Customers
• Inventory
• Product data
• Customer groups
• Invoice data
• Transactions

If there is an API available for your ERP system, Core dna can integrate directly with your ERP using the API to call/push the data that you are looking for. We currently have API level integrations with some of the more popular systems including Microsoft Dynamics and SAP. Often times, however, you may be using a legacy system that does not have an API. We can use secure FTP or CSV files to then connect and pass data to and from Core dna.

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Core dna is fully GDPR compliant. You can find our commitment here - https://www.coredna.com/gdpr

GDPR is short for the General Data Protection Regulation that went into effect on May 25, 2018. Its purpose is to support privacy as a fundamental human right and therefore give EU residents rights over how their personal data is processed or otherwise used.

In preparation for GDPR, we formed a core team of leaders from each area of Coredna.com's business, coordinated by our internal Data Protection Officer (DPO). The representatives in this group were charged with ensuring that all the requirements of GDPR were addressed across all teams. The team met once a week to discuss progress towards GDPR readiness, and has continued to do so following the May 25th 2018 deadline so we can continue to ensure our complete GDPR compliance today and in the future.

We have written extensive content on this topic, which you can find on our site: General data protection regulation, GDPR fines, and GDPR preparation. 

A word of caution though: GDPR encompasses more than just system/platform compliance. There are a host of policies, procedures, and processes that must be established. The right platform can help with that - and Core dna does - but true compliance requires active participation by your team.

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Schedule a one-to-one consultation with your product specialist. Here’s what you can expect: 

Walkthrough: An introduction of the Core dna platform 

Analysis: Personalized recommendations based on your business needs. 

Case studies: How other businesses have used Core dna to scale more efficiently

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Core dna is a fully managed, Zero-Plugin SaaS platform, meaning we take 100% operational responsibility for your infrastructure. Unlike a WordPress-Shopify hybrid for example, which requires a dedicated team to manage plugin conflicts, manual security patches, and server scaling, Core dna automates these tasks at the engine level. 

- Automated Security & Patching: We handle all core upgrades and security patches automatically. Because our features are native rather than third-party plugins, you never have to worry about an update "breaking" your site logic. 

- Native PCI Compliance: Core dna is a PCI-compliant platform. We manage the complex security standards required for global commerce, ensuring your payment environments are secure and reducing your internal compliance burden.

- Infrastructure as a Service: We handle server scaling, load balancing, and global CDN delivery. Whether you have 10 sites or 100, your infrastructure scales automatically to handle traffic surges with zero manual intervention from your DevOps team.

- Continuous Modernization: Unlike versioned software (like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal) that requires a "rebuild" every few years, Core dna is a Continuous Modernization platform. We deploy enhancements every two weeks, ensuring your enterprise stack is always up-to-date and secure.

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Yes, and in practice most integrations do. A common pattern is to let a webhook notify your system the moment an event occurs — say, a new order — and then use an API call to pull the full order record or push an update back to another system. The webhook handles the real-time trigger; the API handles the on-demand data exchange.

Core dna is built for exactly this. Our platform pairs a documented REST API with a webhooks engine, so you can react to events in real time and query or sync data on your own schedule from the same integration.

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Reach for a webhook when you need to act the instant something happens and don't want to keep asking — an order placed, a payment processed, inventory changed. The event pushes the data to you automatically, which is lighter on resources than repeatedly polling an API.

Reach for an API when your system needs to control the timing — pulling a product catalog on a schedule, syncing customer records, or running a query on demand. Many teams use both, and Core dna's content and commerce platform supports each pattern across its native integrations.

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Yes. Core dna provides a documented REST API for integrating our content and commerce platform with your existing software, alongside a webhooks engine for real-time, event-driven updates.

On top of that, Core dna offers hundreds of prebuilt native integrations — SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, Stripe, HubSpot and more — so you can connect legacy systems, run file transfers, or build against the latest API technology. If a system has an API, Core dna can integrate with it.

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Core dna seamlessly connects with your existing tools to create a unified ecosystem—whether it’s HR systems, CRMs, or third-party platforms, our API-first architecture and pre-built integrations ensure smooth data flow. This means your team can work more efficiently without the hassle of manual processes or disjointed systems."

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Yes. Forms are a native Core dna application, so a form you build in the admin can hand its submissions to another system the moment they are captured — no CSV exports, no copy-paste between tools.

There are three ways to make the connection, depending on what your CRM supports:

• Pre-built integrations. Core dna ships direct integrations with common CRMs, ERPs, payment processors and identity providers. Where one exists, mapping a form field to a CRM field is configuration rather than development.
• The open API. Our API-first architecture lets your CRM pull submissions, or lets Core dna push them, using the fields you choose.
• The Hooks orchestration engine. Hooks covers everything without a native connector: trigger on submission, transform the payload, route it to one destination or several, and retry on failure.

A single form can feed more than one destination at once — for example pushing a lead into your CRM while notifying a sales channel and writing the record back into a customer portal. If your CRM is a legacy system with no API at all, we can still exchange data over secure FTP or scheduled CSV transfer.

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A 7-minute overview on deploying to different environments on Core dna.

Video transcription: How to Deploy to Different Environments on Core dna

So in this video we're going to see how development is done on coordinate by front end teams. The coordinate platform is completely decoupled from the UX. So front end development teams can actually build complex front end users lined interactions for customers while being able to use standardized language to talk to Core dna.

I've just logged into an IDE, just a normal IDE. And what you'll notice about this on the left hand side is a structure of how this particular site, this demonstration site that we're working from, is structured.

You'll see that it has assets that are there. It'll have the modules which are the Core dna applications that are being used. It will have a templates directory where we have the base templates. It'll have a template directory which is where the compile templates go.

It may have a web images directory. You'll see the node modules has been installed as we'll be using Gulp in this particular project to build out our JavaScript and we'll have our source JavaScript and then finally we'll have a distribution JavaScript.

So as a developer you can establish your own environment the way you'd like to work on it. And as long as you stay within the standards of the modules directory, the web images and the template directory, then your site should function normally. 

In addition, what you'll also notice down the righthand side here is that this site is connected to the Git repo. And it's a very straightforward approach to once you have either use ours or use your own repo, you're able to look at all the remote branches, all the different branches that have been developed for this website, and you're able to create new branches and check out branches. 

So Core dna has complete integration into Git and offers you the ability to push your changes to a QA environment for testing and then to merge those changes into production. But before you kind of get into the QA environments and pushing to the repos and all that, most developers just want to be able to quickly develop.

  And what Core dna has is a SFTP environment development environment that we've established. And it's very simple to configure. You go down to deployment, you can go down to configure and you can establish your connection to the host. 

You can set up your mappings for how you want the site to map, and you can then establish it as a connection. So really, to deploy to those environments is very simple. You make a change to a site. So I'm going to go into a site here, and I'm going to update this tag here to say Sam was here, and all we do is save. 

And you'll notice that the changes are sent instantaneously to our dev server. And when we look at the environment, we can see here that if we press refresh on the dev environment, all of a sudden now Sam was here on the dev environment, and if we want to remove it, it's a simple case of just removing the content. 

And it will automatically transfer and then just press refresh and the change will be gone. So in this way, developers can quickly create UX's and themes and solutions for their customers in a very localized approach. 

And then when they're ready, they can then push those changes into production. And so we have here the production version of the Media Center and you'll notice that it has a number of similar directories. 

You'll see here is the source files we can return and then we have the all JS files. We then have the modules that are being used and they generally mimic the modules that are here. Now, once a developer is ready to push their changes into testing, they're able to then come to their IDE and do a commit and a push. 

And what happens then is through the use of webhooks, Core dna is able to then apply those changes to the production environment. If we take a longer look at the repo itself, we're able to see that this keeps all the commits that you do. 

And so this hasn't been updated in a number of months, but we can actually go into those commits and have a look at what were the changes, what exactly changed, and if we want to, we can actually back those changes out. 

In addition, we can see all the branches that are currently available and at what progress these branches are in terms of the master branch. So we can actually switch between them. We can also see the pull request that have occurred and so on. 

So all the sites that you work on actually can be found here and you're able to navigate between them. You could do a you can go into a site, clone the site, pull it down, it then becomes available in your IDE, and you can begin work either by doing a deploy to your deploy environment or by doing a commit and push for small changes straight through to your Bitbucket account.  The IDE itself supports the inclusion of Git. It's very simple to set up and also includes the ability to deploy. So as long as your server or your ID can support it, you can then use Core dna to develop out of the box. 

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Core dna is a unified digital platform that combines content management, ecommerce, integrations, and workflow orchestration in one system. Instead of stitching together separate CMS tools, commerce engines, and middleware, Core dna brings those capabilities into a single platform that teams can manage and extend from one place.

In practical terms, that means businesses can run their website, online store, member portal, learning platform, or multi-site ecosystem without maintaining multiple vendors or complex integrations. Content, products, users, and workflows all live in the same environment.

The goal is simple: reduce operational complexity while giving teams the flexibility to build custom digital experiences without assembling a large stack of third-party tools.

If you want a quick visual walkthrough of how the platform works, you can watch the overview here:

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A 17-minute overview of the Core Content and Core Marketing. Learn about Pages, Blogs, News, FAQs and more!

For more, explore the best types of content creation for eCommerce.

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A 2-minute overview of some of our digital workplace solutions using Core Teams. Learn about Projects, Support, Ideas, Timesheets and more!

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A 10-minute overview about Pages app on Core dna. Learn about configuration, permissions, setup, and many more via the Core dna DXP admin.

Video transcription

Welcome to the Coordinate Pages application.

Through this video, we will explore how the Pages application can be used to create content for your website. We'll then look at the Admin interface to see how Pages actually works. And then we'll deep dive from a technical standpoint to see how the Pages application can be built. 

So the Pages application is one of the most commonly used applications within Core dna.

When you scroll down a page, most likely the Pages application is being used to render the content, whether it be Video content, image Content or different types of components within the site. 

The Page's content also has the ability for us to create what we call Style Guides, which are the various components that we create for our website user to use. In this case here we can see the variety of components that have been constructed for that particular site.

The Pages component also can have content that comes in from other parts of the website. So as we scroll down the bottom here, we can see two blogs that have been posted inside the Style Guide. And when you click on them, it takes you into the Blog Posts area.

So how does the Pages module work? Well, let's log into Core dna.

The Pages application sits within the Content family over on the right. So when we kick off the Pages application, it serves two major functions. The first one, it provides the various navigations for the different parts of the system. And secondly, it provides the content. So when we look to the left, we can see here the main navigation pane which highlights Insights, Editors, Reader Group, Resources and Sample Page.

If we go back to our website, we'll notice media room, insights, resources and sample page. There are a number of menu options missing. The reason for this is one of the first features of the Page's module is its ability to segment content. So if we click on the Editors page, we can go across the top and see the Authority tab. The Authority tab is what allows us to segment content.

When we look down the Authority tab, we can see the major components. Firstly, we have what we call Inherited Access. Inherit Access tells the system to go to the parent and look for the access control at the parent. In this case, we've unclick the Inherit Access and by default, if we don't know who you are, you won't see the page. So, because we don't know who's logged in, the system will not show this particular page.

If, however, you're part of the Editor Group, you will have all access to this page. So let's see this. In practice, we go over to the login, we log in as Editor and now we'll find the Editors page. 

When we log out of the system, the system will say no editors Page. This is a really cool feature that can actually allow you to create multiple segments and you can see here, we've used it for the reader group, and within the reader group, we've broken it down into internal readers, external readers and common content.

One of the other features of the Pages application is its ability to create multiple menus. And so here when we look down the main navigation bar, we can also see the footer navigation, which corresponds to the bottom of the page, and the info navigation, which is used somewhere within the system to provide linkages. 

We can also create what we call landing pages. Landing pages are the ones that we define, that customers are sent to and may not see a menu or may want to have specific content that's part of a promotion or a campaign that we may be running. So let's go back to the home page.

Now, the Page's application allows you to put content in many as forms. In the details page. You can see here that we can create content. We have publishing settings. We also have some custom fields that we've created to provide us some tagging. 

In addition, we have the SEO button across the top. This allows us to create focused keywords, the metadata and meta description, and also the social media overrides that we may want to put in place for when people copy the page. 

We've spoken about the Authority module. We then also have what we call Linked Content. Linked Content provide us the ability to create components that are linked to other parts of the system.

I won't go into too much detail into this application. It's part of the application as I'll cover some other areas in terms of attachments. So attachments in this particular implementation of Pages is the way that the site is created. And what we can see here is all the different components that have been created for the page to render. 

So as we go through, we'll see we have the top image, which is a hero full.

We have tapped content. Further down, we have posts by tags from the blogs. And if we go back to the home page of the site, we'll notice that there's the Hero, there's your Tabbed Content. And then these are the posts from your blog posts. And we can continue to build these pages for as far as we like.

Editing these pages very easy. Just press the edit button. You asked for the title, you asked for a category. And we'll talk a little bit more about how we construct these categories. And these represent all the components.

We then have a link heading, and within here we can also have custom property. So here we've created some custom data, we've created some background colors, we've created some button colors and various other aspects that we want to run for the component.

Pages also has the ability for you to allocate layouts. So layouts are the different page layouts that you may want to construct. In this case, we have five different layouts, content layout, a features layout, default layout site, an XML layout and a pricing layout. And we can also see here we have the ID of the page and a Gui ID that can be used to transfer the page across sites from a share perspective, we also have the ability to share the page using social media as long as we configure the social elements that we need. 

Finally, the config area of the site allows us to configure the various aspects of managing the page's application.

So the first part is our Blueprints. Our blueprints are the descriptors for the different types of layouts that we have and also and are used within the layouts area. We also have the categories. So we saw these categories earlier. These are the definitions for the components that we create in the page and where they're actually used.

So here we can see the two column, three row blue is used in three pages or four pages and we can go and modify those pages. When we get into the technical aspect of Pages, we'll discover how the ID here is used within the coordinate system to connect the component to the actual descriptor. 

Here we can also manage properties and these are generally the custom fields for the pages. And here you can see the various dropdown types of properties that we've created for us to use within the categories. And we also have the layouts.

And the layouts allow us to connect the layout file and give it a description so we can use it within the system. Finally, we have the manage configuration. 

So manage configuration throughout the system is where we can extend the platform or provide features to the platform that customers have asked for in the past that allow us to set the application up in a way that makes sense for our use. And you can see here that we have various elements. For example, takeover pages.

We may have an upgrade that we've done, we may have metadata that we want to apply and also some SEO bits. That's the first part of our discussion on the Pages application.

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Yes. Core dna has direct integrations with common ERPs (SAP, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365), PIMs, CRMs, payment processors, scheduling and booking systems, and identity providers, plus an open API and the Hooks orchestration engine for everything else. ERP sync is real-time and bidirectional. For multi-brand operators, the ERP integration is configured once and runs across every brand.

The same applies to operational systems. We pull schedules from your booking system so customers see real-time availability per location, push leads into your CRM, and sync customer records into your member portal.

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Core dna makes PCI compliance easy by offering integrated payment gateways that allow merchants to securely transmit credit card data via direct post API methods or with hosted payment forms provided by the payment gateway and integrated with the merchant’s checkout pages.

The Direct Post method allows for information to be sent directly to the payment gateway without sensitive data flowing through or stored on the Core dna application server. We currently have over 20 integrated payment gateways. If we do not have the one you are currently using, we are happy to integrate with it for you. 

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Yes. Core dna writes to SAP through custom endpoints. It looks up or creates the customer, builds the sales order with the right routing, reserves inventory, and hands off to logistics. For V-ZUG, an order that took around 15 minutes to raise by hand now takes a couple of minutes.

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Core dna integrates with SAP, Oracle NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Infor, Epicor, and Sage, syncing inventory, pricing, product data, and orders in both directions. Core dna's integrations are part of the platform. Your storefront always shows accurate stock and pricing without manual updates.

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No — though they're closely related. An API (application programming interface) is a two-way channel: your system sends a request and gets a response, so you control when data moves. A webhook is one-way and event-driven: the moment something happens — an order is placed, a payment clears — the source app automatically pushes the data to a URL you specify, with no request needed.

The simplest way to think about it: with an API you ask for data; with a webhook the data comes to you. Core dna provides both a REST API and a webhooks engine, so you can use whichever fits the job.

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Core dna is designed on open, component-based architecture to be a flexible environment that can be easily managed. The architecture supports a range of operations and has been tested on both Unix and Windows based platforms. This helps to reduce problems that can arise from different operating systems and allows flexibility during deployment. The presentation layer supports an interaction with the business logic through the services layer. It allows the flexibility for each of our clients to control the look and feel of their website as well as the functional modules they wish to deliver.

The technology is built on the scaleable technology stack. Linux base operating system, Apache HTTPd web server, MariaDB database layer and PHP development language. The front end stack is agnostic and we have developed solutions using a variety of front end frameworks including Bootstrap, Foundation, UI kit, AngularJS, React.

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