How It Works

Choose the Optical setup that fits your needs — from ready-made simplicity with Optical Basic to full frontend flexibility with Optical Flex.

Optical Basic offers a curated library of ready-made content blocks and templates, empowering users to quickly build and manage beautiful, compliant websites without writing code. It’s a fast, reliable option for teams who want a no-fuss way to get started.

For teams with strict design and functionality requirements, Optical Flex grants you full control over your frontend experience.

With Optical Flex, agencies and vendors can build fully bespoke frontends while leveraging Optical’s powerful content management capabilities. Extend your site with custom content blocks, tailored templates, advanced processing logic, and third-party integrations — all designed to meet your unique needs.

Optical handles the content, you define how it’s delivered — pixel-perfect, process-specific, and fully under your control.

To help you hit the ground running, we can provide your web vendors or agency developers with a ready-to-use Web App Server repository built using Next.JS, hosted on SGTS GitLab. This starter kit comes pre-configured for Optical integration, so there’s no need to build from scratch. Your team can start customising immediately, and focus on building the features that matter most!

How to Add Custom Content Blocks Not Offered Out of the Box using Optical Flex?

Optical provides a flexible content modeling system that lets you define your own content blocks beyond the standard ones offered. If your website requires a custom layout or feature — like a carousel — (step 1) you can create a new collection (data model) in the CMS to capture the required fields (e.g., titles, descriptions, images, links).

Once the content structure is in place, your developers can (step 2) fetch this data via Optical’s API and (step 3) build a corresponding frontend component using Next.js. This gives you complete freedom to design and implement any type of content block your site needs, while still managing the content centrally in Optical.

Optical Flex allows agencies to build custom frontends with a choice of two hosting models, depending on how much infrastructure responsibility and integration complexity you require.

Full Stack Hosting

Optical manages both the CMS and the custom frontend server container, including CDN and supporting infrastructure. Infrastructure-level compliance, availability, and scaling are handled by us, while the agency manages the frontend code and application-layer security (e.g., VA via SHIP-HATS).

Recommended When:

• Your custom frontend needs to integrate with services accessible via the internet zone.

• You do not require connectivity to GEN or Common Services VPC.

CMS Only Hosting

Optical hosts only the CMS backend. The agency is responsible for hosting and maintaining the custom frontend infrastructure — including container deployment, CDN, networking setup, and compliance — in their own cloud environment (typically AWS).

Recommended When:

• Your custom frontend needs to integrate with systems that require GEN or Common Services VPC connectivity.

• You require fine-grained control over your network setup and deployment environment.