The modern CMS for higher education
Streamline your university or college’s content operations – from production through to delivery
Try Contensis
Join the universities powered by Contensis
Build on a future-proof platform
Contensis is a headless content management system designed to meet the needs of content teams and developers in modern higher education institutions.
Make more of your content
Its content modelling, editing, and governance tools simplify creating and maintaining quality content. Flexible APIs make it easy to use that content in websites, apps, and other digital experiences.
Manage websites built with headless content
A built-in deployment platform makes it easy to host and manage multiple websites – giving you all the benefits of a headless CMS with none of the drawbacks.
Headless multi-channel publishing
Structure your content to suit your needs
Well-structured content makes life simpler for content authors and developers. Contensis stores your content as small reusable pieces, making it easier to find and maintain – wherever it's used. Authors get ready-made templates for creating content, and developers get data in the format they need.
Eliminate mistakes at source
Give authors the exact fields and data formats they need to create specific types of content. Configure validation settings to ensure you have quality content for all of your projects. Make fields required, add character limits, and use pattern matching to check email addresses and URLs.
Manage multiple sites or apps from a single platform
Manage multiple websites from a single Contensis CMS. Whether you manage all of your sites from a single project, or create specific projects inside Contensis for different websites and apps, our flexible APIs and built-in deployment platform unlock an agile approach to multi-site management.
Deliver content to any platform or software system
Go beyond websites. Our RESTful Delivery API lets you publish your content as JSON using your favourite coding language. So, you can easily reuse your website content in mobile apps and VLEs, or use Contensis to store content for building MOOCs and other platforms.
Case studies
Canterbury Christ Church University
Read how a long term Contensis client moved from on-premise to the cloud and improved lead generation.
University of Hull
When web traffic increased by 180%, the University of Hull's website continued to run unphased, thanks to Contensis.
Produce higher quality content, faster
Collaborate on content
Don't take the conversation offline. Comment on fields in content entries to leave feedback or questions for colleagues. Mention another user in a comment and they'll be notified by email. You can check your comments and replies at any time from the Contensis dashboard.
Manage and preview web pages built with structured content
If an entry is being used as a web page and is attached to a URL, the built-in preview feature allows authors and approvers to check content renders correctly before they publish it.
Put an end to content bottlenecks
Need content to go through multiple stages of review or approval? Flexible custom workflows allow you to add extra approval stages to accommodate complex editorial processes. Workflows are applied on a content type basis, so courses can have completely different stages to news articles or events.
Take the pain out of writing long-form content
Write articles, policies or other long-form content in our block-based text editor, Canvas. It supports slash commands and Markdown in a similar way to apps like Notion or Google Docs. Canvas stores content as JSON, making it easy to reuse and restyle across multiple platforms.
Reach potential students at scale with modern student recruitment tools
Build on-brand landing pages in record time
Go composable and empower marketers, content teams and other non-technical users to build on-brand and accessible landing pages without developers. Combine fields to create components that match complex patterns in your design system.
Create and manage forms
Capture data anywhere using easy-to-build forms. Insert forms in content entries to render them on your Contensis powered sites or add them to external websites using a simple script. Push form data into other software systems automatically using Zapier or our Forms API and webhooks.
Tailor experiences using data-driven personalisation
Contensis integrates with industry-leading platforms like Uniform to deliver sophisticated personalised digital experiences. Tailor messaging to specific audiences to increase engagement. Show different content depending on whether a visitor is a current student, prospective applicant, or parent.
Protect your investment with modern content governance tools
Streamline multi-lingual content production, reduce risks, and maintain brand integrity with Contensis' comprehensive content governance features. Elevate your university's reputation, efficiency, and success with features and tools that help you ensure your content is high quality, up-to-date, and meets regulatory requirements.
Ensure every piece of content is on-brand and accessible
The number of disabled students at UK universities has increased year-on-year, with 16% of UK-domiciled students enrolled in the 2021/22 academic year having a known disability. Make sure your pages are accessible to all students using Insytful - our quality assurance tool. Insytful reports on a range of quality, accessibility, SEO, and performance issues with your sites.
Easily manage multilingual teams
Granular user permissions let you specify what content and languages users can manage. Create roles to quickly grant and revoke permissions for groups of users. Whether you operate a centralised or devolved publishing model, easily tailor the permissions teams need to do their jobs.
Put a stop to content rot
Ensure your content is always relevant and up-to-date by scheduling it to be published and unpublished at specific dates and times. Drill down into the health of your content by creating views – custom searches based on any field in your entries. For example, find all Course entries belonging to a specific content owner and created in the last year.
Enterprise-level features for agile institutions
We believe that the future of digital experience management is API-first and composable. Assembling your own ecosystem of tools gives you a customisable, extensible and future-proof solution that's tailored to your specific needs. But we also believe that you shouldn't have to procure a dozen systems to get a new site up and running. Contensis comes complete with the tools and features you need to build enterprise-level websites from day one, leaving you to integrate other tools as necessary.
Powerful search functionality
Surface all your content – entries, assets, and external content – in one combined search. Our Management API and webhooks make it easy to check when content is updated in other business systems and non-Contensis websites and bring it into Contensis. You can then search your content with ZenQL, our own purpose-built query language.
Integrations with best-of-breed tools and platforms
Integrate Contensis with your most important systems. Push Contensis form data to your CRM or student records system. Pull data from your research information management system into Contensis to use it in your website, intranet or other apps. Get data flowing quickly using Zapier or build more complex bespoke integrations using webhooks and the Contensis Management API.
Scalable, flexible and resilient hosting
Contensis includes a built-in deployment platform for running websites and web apps. This approach unlocks agile development, allowing your site owners to preview, release or rollback code changes from Contensis. And, our Enterprise licence includes 99.99% uptime for both your CMS and hosting, so you can sleep at night knowing your website is working even when you're not.