At dotCMS, content has always been powerful, but also scattered. Pages, images, documents, and structured content live in separate areas, which works if you know exactly what you need. But for complex projects or a high-level view, it falls short. After seeing how this fragmentation impacts users across roles, our design, product, and engineering teams came together to solve a core challenge:
👉 How can we give users a centralized, flexible, and intuitive space to manage all their digital content?
The Problem
Before the Content Drive, users had to:
Jump between the Content Search, Browser, and Portlets
Struggle with a rigid folder structure and limited metadata
No quick way to preview content
Guess where an asset lived based on its type
The Vision: A Unified Content Drive
We envisioned something better:
A centralized workspace that could hold all types of content, files, folders, pages, and assets in one unified, flexible interface.
Inspired by familiar file explorer paradigms, we designed the Content Drive to:
Act as a single source of truth for all content in dotCMS
Reduce the need to jump between screens
Offer flexible ways to view, organize, and act on content
Set the foundation for AI-powered workflows and advanced DAM capabilities
The Design Solution
The new Content Drive is a workspace built for content authors, developers, marketers, and everyone.
It features:
Expandable Folder Tree (Left Panel)
Gives users a clear, navigable view of folder structures
Let's them drag and drop items into new folders
Reveals the content hierarchy for fast orientation
Expands and collapses depending on the user’s needs
View Port with a Table of All Content Items (Main Panel)
Displays mixed content types in a unified grid
Supports multi-select actions, sorting, and personalized filters
Makes it easy to organize and find assets for any project
Filtering and Search That Adapts to You and Your Role
To reduce clutter and focus on what matters, we added two powerful filters:
Base Type: Think “what kind of object is this?” Page, Image, Folder, etc.
Content Type: For filtering structured content like Blogs, Products, Articles, etc.
These filters help users focus on what they need, whether they’re content authors reviewing assets, marketers organizing campaigns, or developers managing page templates. Each persona can personalize their view to match their workflow, making the Content Drive feel purpose-built for their role and tasks. This supports a broader vision: enabling users to tailor dotCMS to their own jobs to be done, not the other way around.
Contextual Panel (Right Side)
Automatically updates with metadata and previews based on the selection
Offers tabs for details, upcoming AI tools, and collaborative comments
Contextual buttons
CTA buttons change dynamically based on what’s selected, a system we call User Workflows
These are customizable, action-triggering buttons defined by user needs (e.g. Publish, Archive, Save, etc.)
My Role as a Product Designer
From the beginning, my mission was to make this system flexible without feeling overwhelming.
I focused on:
Mapping out current interactions and functionalities
Prototyping different panel behaviors and selection flows
Creating a walkthrough based on our user personas and the edge cases they face, helping us achieve feature parity while addressing a wide range of user needs.
Designing reusable, responsive components
Aligning the layout with user tasks and mental models
Ensuring accessibility and reducing cognitive overload
Testing edge cases (e.g., what happens when you drag 100 items?)
Working across disciplines, collaborating with PMs, engineers, and QA to test edge cases and scale gracefully
But above all, this was a team effort. We worked across design, product, and engineering, incorporating internal and external feedback, usability sessions, and real-world use cases from our customer base.
Looking Ahead
The Content Drive is just the beginning. It lays the groundwork for:
AI-powered workflows (auto-tagging, content insights, routing)
Project-based organization (grouping content by project)
Real-time collaboration with comments and change tracking
Why It Matters
By reducing context switching and aligning with how users naturally think about content, the Content Drive speeds up daily tasks, simplifies onboarding, and supports more intuitive, personalized, and flexible project workflows.
Final Thoughts
Designing the Content Drive was about more than just modernizing a UI. It was about solving real pain points, improving focus, and building a foundation for what comes next in content management.
We’re excited to see how our users will adopt and extend this space, and we’re just getting started.
Have feedback? Want to see what’s next? We’d love to hear from you.