Ontraport's Dynamic CMS takes the data you've stored in your account and turns it into personalized web pages. You can use it to build blogs, online courses, customer portals and searchable listings, all without code. This lesson gives you the big picture. The rest of this section covers each piece in depth.
Some of your data should stay private. But some of it is really useful to show your customers. Picture a vet clinic with a client portal. Clients log in, see each of their pets, and check each pet's appointments, visit notes and prescriptions. Each of those is a custom object, related to Pets, and each pet is related to its owner. That's why the custom objects section came first. How you organize your data is the foundation for everything you'll build here.
The first building block is the dynamic page. A dynamic template is one shared design, and Ontraport uses it to create a page for every record. Think of a blog: one layout, and every post gets its own page with its own content. You can make a template for any object, so a pet template gives every pet its own page.
To create one, hover over Pages in the top navigation and click Dynamic Templates. You pick the object the template pulls from. Then you link each headline, text or image element to one of that object's fields.
Sometimes you want one page that lists many records. That's a dynamic block. A pet's page could list all of that pet's visit notes. A blog post could show a grid of related articles. You can put dynamic blocks on a regular Ontraport page or on a dynamic template. They can list records from your objects, users or products, or records related to the person who's visiting.
Ontraport often knows who's visiting. They might have the Ontraport cookie, which gets set when someone clicks a link in your email, fills out a form, or clicks a tracked link. Or they might be logged in to your membership site. Either way, you can personalize what they see. In the vet portal, a dynamic block can show only the pets related to the visiting contact, so each client sees their own pets and nobody else's.
To use any of this, the account owner adds a Dynamic CMS package. Click your profile icon, then Account. Next to "Add Dynamic CMS to your account," start a trial or add a plan. Each package sets limits on custom objects, records per object, and records displayed each billing cycle. A record counts as displayed each time it loads on a dynamic page or block.
If you need faster pages, there's an optional high-performance caching server. It serves a saved copy of pages that don't need fresh data every time they're viewed, so they load faster, and cached records don't count toward your records displayed. You add it by changing your Dynamic CMS plan on the same Account page.
One more thing: dynamic pages and blocks have to be hosted by Ontraport. They don't show up on pages displayed through the Ontrapages WordPress plugin. And unlike standard pages, dynamic pages can't be shared or split tested.
After dynamic pages and dynamic blocks, you'll learn page types and publishing. A page type sets the web address for each page. You can publish pages for all your existing records at once, for new records automatically, by hand from a record's Pages tab, with group actions, or from an automation.
Next comes privacy and data security. For private information, the safest choice is to require a login. Show the page only to logged-in members, and use the "Contact matches dynamic page record" condition, so members only see their own information.
And if you're comfortable with HTML and CSS, dynamic list HTML lets you design repeating lists the drag-and-drop editor can't easily make, like a sidebar of related articles. It's available on some Dynamic CMS plans.
So: dynamic pages give every record its own page from one template, dynamic blocks list many records on one page, and both can be personalized for whoever's visiting. Next up, we'll build our first dynamic pages.