topic Re: [Now Live] Exclusive CMS Hub AMA (Nov 16) in CMS Development

[Closed] Exclusive CMS Hub AMA (Nov 16)

PatrickEng — Sat, 21 Nov 2020 17:18:34 GMT

Hey HubSpot Community,

My name is Patrick Eng and I’m a member of the Onboarding Team at HubSpot. Your website is one of your biggest assets and with your CMS Hub plan, you can easily set up, customize, and manage all your pages while also leveraging the power of the HubSpot CRM. And with CMS Enterprise being released earlier this year, the ability to create custom objects, and even create dynamic content through HubDB or serverless functions, we want to ensure you have all of the answers to be set up for success using CMS Hub. We’ll be available to answer questions from November 16 - November 20, so please feel free to ask us anything. 
 
Need some suggestions for what to ask? Here are some example questions:

Is it worth setting up a blog?
What’s the difference between a blog post, a landing page, and a website page?
How many domains can I have?
How can I optimize my pages for SEO?
How can I best use the Content Staging tool?
How do I use HubDB?
How do I customize a Theme?
We have members of the HubSpot product, developer, support, and success team here to answer any questions you might have. 
 
Luke Summerfield (@Lukesummerfield) - CMS Hub Go-To-Market Lead, Product
Katie Tade (@katie) - Product Manager
Will Spiro (@wspiro) - Product Manager
Snaedís Valsdóttir (@snaedis) - Associate Product Manager
Jon McLaren (@jmclaren) - Senior CMS Developer Advocate
A.J. LaPorte (@AJLaPorte) - Senior CMS Developer Advocate
Ashley Kim - Customer Success Manager
Joe Roche (@joerr) - Customer Success Manager
Madelyn Simmons - Customer Success Manager
Allison Nichols (@anichols) - Principal Onboarding Specialist
Jermaine Charvy (@jcharvy) - Principal Onboarding Specialist
Ian McKeown - Principal Onboarding Specialist
Justin (@jtit) - Senior Customer Onboarding Specialist
Patrick Eng (@PatrickEng) - Customer Onboarding Specialist
Cooper McDonald (@cmcdonald) - Senior Customer Support Specialist
Ernestina Spinu (@eSpinu) - Senior Customer Support Specialist
Cathal Hopper (@CathalHopper) - Customer Support Specialist
 
Feel free to drop in your questions below. We’ll start answering questions on November 16th and until 3 PM EST on November 20th.
 
Look forward to hearing from you soon!

Re: [Now Live] Exclusive CMS Hub AMA (Nov 16)

stefen — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 17:18:42 GMT

@PatrickEng when I take a step back and look at the larger trend that HubSpot has been doing with their products the past couple years—opening up their products to smaller businesses with lower price points—will there ever be a "Starter" CMS option offered?

Signed by a web developer that would love to not have to manage PHP servers any longer. 😊

Re: [Now Live] Exclusive CMS Hub AMA (Nov 16)

lukesummerfield — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 17:36:26 GMT

Hi Stefen - thanks for breaking the ice with the first question of today's CMS Hub AMA! 😀

I don't think you're alone in wanting a lighter-weight CMS Starter product. 🙂 Not everyone is ready or a good fit for our Professional-level product line - I can see the value in having a lighter-weight CMS that makes it easier for customers to get started.

It's a topic we've been thinking about internally, however, we don't have anything officially planned. That said, I'd be curious to learn more about what you'd like to see in a CMS Starter and where it could help solve challenges. If you're up for a chat, please send me an email (Luke -at- HubSpot (dot) com).

P.S. I also don't think you're alone in not wanting to manage PHP anymore. 😉

Re: [Now Live] Exclusive CMS Hub AMA (Nov 16)

DRosier — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 20:47:39 GMT

We are currently using HS and integrate with BigCommerce which is not always the smoothest thing. What capabilities exist within CMS to not only manage our website but encompass our ecommerce needs? Can it do everything or would I still need a separate ecommerce solution. If it is a separate app, then what plaforms integrate with Hubspot?

Re: [Now Live] Exclusive CMS Hub AMA (Nov 16)

PatrickEng — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 22:44:33 GMT

Hey @DRosier ,

HubSpot does not have an out of the box ecommerce component to our system. That being said, Piesync from HubSpot does have many connections to ecommerce solutions that can help connect the different systems together. In addition to PieSync, you could also leverage either the native Shopify integration or the eCommerce Bridge. Depending on your product library and technical resources, you could build something on the HubSpot CMS that mimics an eCommerce platform but it would require heavy technical resources. Working with either a custom integration or a 3rd party like PieSync can remove a lot of that technical heavy lifting.

Re: [Now Live] Exclusive CMS Hub AMA (Nov 16)

DMakris — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 00:05:09 GMT

What is the best practice/approach to deal with page hierarchy?

Ex.

Let's say that we have 5 product pages (HS websites pages ) and we want to show them by navigating to a central product page.

Re: [Now Live] Exclusive CMS Hub AMA (Nov 16)

GabbeKG — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 08:30:47 GMT

Hi! I'm still fairly new to hubspot CMS and got my certificate yesterday, but one thing i've wonder is if there's plans or a way to enabled intellisense to the design manager? Would be a nice thing to have for faster coding and readability(when I created a custom module it felt like the 3 different codeblock stacked on eachother made things harder than it has to be).

And secondly will there or is there a way to use shortcommands for coding? For example when using an IDE i usually make use of Alt+up/down arrowkey to move the marked lines if i made a mistake in the structure or or want to move a tag to a lower or higher level.

Re: [Now Live] Exclusive CMS Hub AMA (Nov 16)

wspiro — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 13:33:46 GMT

Hey @gabbar! Great question.

At the moment, we have no immediate plans to bring an intellisense-type experience to the Design Manager. However, we have been investing in the local development experience, allowing developers to bring their own tools and technologies to the CMS development experience. If you have not checked out the CMS CLI, it allows you to use whatever IDE/text editor you prefer, with whatever extensions you prefer. This tutorial takes you through getting up and running with the CLI in a few easy steps.

We recently released the HubSpot VS Code Extension for Visual Studio Code, which has code snippet completion, syntax highlighting, and more, to make the local development experience smooth and efficient. Using the CLI and this extension might bring that intellisense-type experience you are looking for! It is possible we bring features like this to the Design Manager at some point, but this is not currently planned.

We would love to hear your experience with these tools, and both the CLI and Visual Studio Code extension are open source if you are interested in getting involved, find any bugs, or have any features requests: https://github.com/HubSpot/hubspot-cms-vscode https://github.com/HubSpot/hubspot-cms-tools

Re: [Now Live] Exclusive CMS Hub AMA (Nov 16)

jmclaren — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 15:25:46 GMT

@DMakris wrote:

What is the best practice/approach to deal with page hierarchy?

Ex.

Let's say that we have 5 product pages (HS websites pages ) and we want to show them by navigating to a central product page.

Hey there @DMakris, thanks for asking.

From an SEO perspective this blog post explains fairly well some good practices around creating an information architecture.

From a development standpoint there are 3 primary ways to build these product listing and individual product pages, and the path you take depends on the individual business's needs.

Use normal web site pages with drag and drop areas

This is ideal for scenarios where a company has only a few products or services. It gives them a ton of flexibility to build the pages to suit their needs. However when you start having dozens of products this becomes more difficult to manage.

Use HubDB to create dynamic pages (CMS Hub Pro and Enterprise)

This enables you to create a massive amount of pages by updating one HubDB table - which is like editing a spreadsheet. This is especially useful in scenarios where products and services have similar types of data associated with them. Think things like:

Price
colors
size
features

With HubDB you can display all of that information in consistent ways across all of the product pages making the user experience more consistent and easy to understand.

Use custom objects (Requires an enterprise product)

Custom objects are a really powerful and unique way to go. To the developer using custom objects will feel very similar to working with HubDB. The advantage of custom objects though is that you can associate the data with your other CRM objects, to generate useful business insights.

We have an example of how this can be done for real estate - but it can be applied to almost any business.

Re: [Now Live] Exclusive CMS Hub AMA (Nov 16)

sashacardin — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 17:43:48 GMT

We have our FB messenger linked to our hubspot chat- however when messages originate from instagram and go to the fb messenger they do not come through to hubspot. Is this something that can be done? How

Re: [Now Live] Exclusive CMS Hub AMA (Nov 16)

mpatino — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 19:24:15 GMT

With the emergence of Webmeetings and the expansion of MS Teams inthe space, do you have plans to treat Teams as a viable 'meeting' platform and treat it like you do Zoom and RingCentral? also, Teams is becoming a big VoIP provider. We are on RingCentral but are planning to move to Teams VoIP soon and we want to keep the dial out option we have now with RC.

Re: [Now Live] Exclusive CMS Hub AMA (Nov 16)

PatrickEng — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 22:03:27 GMT

Hi @sashacardin ,

The Facebook Messenger integration only connects your Facebook messages to your HubSpot account. Our Instagram integration itself is purely for scheduling and publishing posts from the HubSpot Social tool. To respond to incoming Instagram messages you will need to log into the native app. There is an existing Idea thread that I would recommend upvoting and commenting on.

Re: [Now Live] Exclusive CMS Hub AMA (Nov 16)

sashacardin — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 22:26:42 GMT

THANK YOU!

Re: [Now Live] Exclusive CMS Hub AMA (Nov 16)

PatrickEng — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 14:15:46 GMT

Hi @mpatino,

We are currently working on a Teams integration! Here is an Idea thread that mentions it and includes some more information on what it's expected to do. I would recommend liking or commenting on that post to both get notified when it's updated and to show interest in the integration.

Re: [Now Live] Exclusive CMS Hub AMA (Nov 16)

herodotuseducat — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 16:41:01 GMT

heya, i have two distinct companies. can i use one hubspot account to manage CRM for both, using 2 different tracking codes?

Re: [Now Live] Exclusive CMS Hub AMA (Nov 16)

cmcdonald — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 17:33:19 GMT

Hey @herodotuseducat -

Tracking codes are generated on a per-portal basis, so using two tracking codes and a single portal will not be possible. That said, applying the same tracking code to multiple domains will still allow for the tracking of page views across all domains, so you should still be able to manage two companies in a single CRM at once.

There are a couple other considerations to make when managing multiple companies in a single HubSpot portal:

how you organize your CRM objects around your brands (having a strategy to keep your brands siloed is important)
landing page usage - on most Marketing subscriptions, a portal is limited to a single brand domain (e.g. for www.hubspot.com, hubspot is the brand domain), so if you want to separate your companies' landing/web pages onto different domains, two portals will be necessary. CMS Hub Enterprise and Marketing Enterprise with an addon can have multiple brand domains.
email preference pages - a portal is limited to a single subscription preferences page for marketing email, so anyone who clicks a link will see subscriptions for both brands.

Re: [Now Live] Exclusive CMS Hub AMA (Nov 16)

Rielyn — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 18:12:51 GMT

Hi there,

Question for a CMS developer advocate (maybe @Lukesummerfield, @jmclaren, or @AJLaPorte? 😊)

All of my website hosting can be done in Hubspot CMS, correct? If so, is there a way to host my ASP.NET Core Api application on hubspot? Maybe in a Docker container?

Thanks!

Re: [Now Live] Exclusive CMS Hub AMA (Nov 16)

jmclaren — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 21:58:08 GMT

Hey there @Rielyn,

HubSpot CMS is not a "general web hosting platform" like godaddy, siteground, bluehost, etc. So that means that ASP.NET applications can't be hosted within HubSpot.

HubSpot CMS is first and foremost a CMS platform directly integrated with everything HubSpot. Depending on what your ASP.NET application does it is likely possible to recreate it in HubSpot. Your web application can be built using HubL HubSpot's templating language, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, your favorite frameworks like ReactJS or VueJS. HubSpot is built to scale. If your app needs to perform authenticated API requests, you would use HubSpot's serverless functions which currently support node.js.

Some of the power of the CMS is that it is deeply integrated with the rest of the HubSpot platform, including the CRM, marketing tools, sales tools, service tools. All of the data gained from your web application, can be used to power your marketing, power your sales, your support teams.

The trade off of restricting the back-end tools that can be used gives us the ability to do some powerful things. On HubSpot you don't worry about:

CMS updates - everyone is always on the latest version
backups - revisions and backups are handled
server side performance - we take care of it for you
Content Delivery Network - out of the box we serve assets through a CDN ensuring speedy delivery and scalable sites.
Your web analytics is directly tied to your CRM and your contacts - superpowering your marketing, sales and support.

That said some of our tools can be embedded into externally hosted platforms such as our analytics tracking code, site forms, Customer satisfaction survey tools etc. So if for your company it doesn't yet make sense to shift everything into HubSpot you can keep your existing systems and get some of the benefits.

Re: [Now Live] Exclusive CMS Hub AMA (Nov 16)

mboo — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 20:40:11 GMT

Easily set up is not TRUE . VERY COMP)LICATED . Even youir rteps cant get my excel sprewad sheet to upload properly

Re: [Now Live] Exclusive CMS Hub AMA (Nov 16)

shermanmc — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 21:00:30 GMT

I need clarity on the specific workflow for opting Marketing contacts in or out to define the subscription tier/fee. We have free HubSpot and want to upgrade to the Starter Bundle. I have tried to get an answner from our HubSpot rep, but he just cancels my meeting requests and tells me that there is no onboarding support because the subcription fee is so low. Does the Contact property already exist in our CRM that defines this? We currently have about 5,000 contacts in our free HubSpot, but may only want to use 500-600 in the Marketing Starter Hub. Is there a good explanation of this somewhere? I read all of the documents that our rep sent us, but even there the contract property is referred to by muliple names ; "Marketing Status" Marketing Email Status". Before I can get approval for the upgrade I need to confirm that we can work under the first tier license of <1,000 marketiing contacts. My rep has just suggested "buy it and then figure it out". Thanks for any help on this.