Offering websites can be a big win for SaaS companies in terms of reducing churn, increasing revenue and raising customer satisfaction. Imagine the benefits of providing your users with a zero-friction, instant website solution, pre-populated with their personalized content all from within your platform’s UI. How much time would your customers save if their website content always stayed up-to-date with the changes they made during their day-to-day usage of your product? The benefits to you and your users would be immense. You’d be happy because you can charge for managing a larger portion of your customer’s business, and your customers would be grateful for the additional time savings and convenience your platform now provides.
Let’s assume you’ve done your research and decided partnering with a website builder is the right move for your business. Naturally, you’ve chosen Duda, as it’s the only editor you can truly make your own. With features like a white-labeled UI, API for programmatic site generation, and the ability to push data directly from your platform to your users’ websites, Duda is the most embeddable website builder on the market. No more dealing with the maintenance nightmare of one-off WordPress sites, and no need to divert your valuable development resources to create an in-house website editor. Duda will provide you with everything you need to augment your core feature set with website building capabilities that will delight your customers.
All of this sounds great, but if you are like most SaaS companies, you want to know exactly what an integration entails. This blog post series will walk you through the steps needed to enable your users to create beautifully designed sites with the click of a button. In Duda, that process starts with creating the templates your users will choose from when they build a new site. And that is precisely the topic we are covering in this first post...
With Duda templates, you have the ability to separate content from design. If you previously used WordPress, this is probably a familiar concept. You create a theme (design), and then later you publish a page or post (content). When a user visits the website, WordPress inserts the content into the design and displays the webpage.
Duda works along similar lines — the templates not only store the design, but also the data connections that allow content to be injected into the template’s layout. You can think of these connected templates as a promise. You’re telling the template, “I’m going to send you some data at some point in the future. When you receive it, you need to display it here.”
The actual content of the site is stored in the template’s Content Library. The Content Library is a series of label/value pairs that hold content. Some labels we provide by default, but additional labels can be added to suit your needs. You can add the values for these labels manually within the Duda editor UI, or via our API.
When you connect a widget in your template to data in the library, you’re able to pick from a list of available labels. This is that promise I mentioned above. This action tells the template that the value in the Content Library identified by this label is what should display in this spot.
Your users are probably entering a treasure trove of content simply through their day-to-day usage of your SaaS platform. Your product might also be computing additional data using that content. When thinking through your template creation, take note of all these inputs and outputs within your product, and decide which values would be pertinent to display on a website. For each piece of data you pick, add a corresponding label in the Content Library. Some examples of useful data might include:
You might not end up using all the values you identified immediately, but having the values in the Content Library will give you flexibility in the future to update a user’s site with more functionality and information. After populating the Content Library with all of your labels, you can add placeholder values to aid you while designing the template. When you create an actual site, you will overwrite the placeholder values with real data. The final step is to connect the elements on your template to labels in the Content Library once you’re satisfied with the design and layout.
With your template connections complete, it’s time to implement the API calls to allow your users to instantly create their websites. Ideally, a user should be able to simply click a “Create Website” button from within your SaaS product. A site will be provisioned based on one of your templates, and the data stored in your platform is pushed to the site’s Content Library. Those promises you made at the template level are now fulfilled, as the new content is deposited into its proper place within the template. At its simplest, this instant website flow only requires two calls to the Duda API.
The create website API call only requires a template_id value to succeed. The template ID identifies which template you want to be the basis for the site. All you need to do is provide the ID of a template with a completed design and configured data connections. You can manually retrieve the template ID via API during development and store the value within your code or database.
Note: API calls require an API username and password to authenticate.
If your call is successful you will receive a site_name back in the response. You should save this value and associate it with an account or entity within your platform as you’ll need it later for some other API calls.
Creating a website from a template, whether by API or from within the Duda UI, copies over the design and data connections of that template. It also copies over the values within the Content Library, which if you were following along above, are currently placeholder values at this point in the process. Now it’s time to update those values with real data from this customer.
The API call to update the Content Library requires a
specific content object schema. However, you are only allowed to include the properties you are updating. Pay particular attention to the site_texts property and how to format values belonging to custom labels.
Your new values will populate in the Content Library, and the data connections you set up previously will make sure the new content is sorted into the correct spots of the design.
If you’ve followed all of these steps, congratulations! You just created an instant site!
I hope this post is useful to you when planning your own integration of Duda with your SaaS platform and sparks some conversation about the types of content you could sync to a Duda website. In the next post of this series, we’ll talk about how to give permissions to your users to edit the new site, through a single sign-on workflow. We’ll also discuss customizing your user’ experience via account permissions. We’ll finish up the series by talking about the integration of more complex data structures, and automatically generating or removing entire pages of content from a site when a user changes data in your platform. Until then, try exploring our API documentation and developer guides to further your understanding of what’s possible with Duda as your embedded website editor.
