SDL Tridion Sites technical overview

In its simplest form, SDL Tridion Sites can be said to consist of a management side and a delivery side. On both sides are multiple servers, databases, and clients and APIs.

SDL Tridion Sites is based on a modular, service-oriented architecture that is flexible and scalable. Open interfaces allow for easy integration with third-party applications.

The following diagram illustrates decoupled architecture with the management and delivery environments separated from one another both architecturally and physically:

Content management side

On the content management side of SDL Tridion Sites:

  • Content Manager is where all your content is created and stored in Content Manager. It is the environment for creating, managing and assembling the various Building Blocks used to build websites or content intended for other channels. Users create content using various Content Manager clients; content is stored in the Content Manager database.
  • Topology Manager is where all information about where to publish the content. It maps the content in Content Manager to the Content Delivery environments. Topology Manager makes logical targets for publishing available to Content Manager to publish, and maps those logical targets to physical targets in the Content Delivery environments.

Authors and editors can publish content to multiple Content Delivery environments. A typical setup will have one Content Delivery environment behind the firewall (the "staging" environment) and another outside it (the "live" environment).

Content delivery side

On the content delivery side, the Content Delivery environments and the presentation environments (that is, your websites) can also be physically separate from each other.

The presentation environments only need to contain the Content Interaction Libraries (CILs for short), which in turn only require a compatible version of .NET or Java. The CILs don't require any specific web and application servers, third-party libraries, nor do they connect to the Content Delivery databases. Instead, the CILs interact with the various Content Delivery server-side microservices, which are standalone and are collectively known as the Content Interaction Services (CIS).

When a user publishes content from the Content Manager to a Content Delivery environment over an HTTP(S) protocol, templates transform the managed content into pieces of content in any format, ready for dynamic assembly and distribution on the Content Delivery side. Because the Content Delivery environments cannot access the Content Manager database directly, sensitive information is protected. Additionally, the decoupled architecture allows for independent scaling and maintenance of each part of the platform, reducing hardware and maintenance costs.

The SDL Tridion Sites architecture also decouples the technology stacks used in each environment. For example. the content management environment using Microsoft Windows and .NET technology can be perfectly paired with a technology stack using Microsoft Windows, Unix, or Linux in combination with Java in the Content Delivery environment.

Content Delivery handles and processes content published from Content Manager, transforms the content into dynamic Web site content, and stores the published content in the Content Data Store (a file system, a relational database, custom storage media, or a combination of these), and puts the content on the Presentation Server, the machine that serves content to Web site visitors.

Content Delivery also exposes its functionality through a number of Capabilities, which Topology Manager can discover by interacting with the service endpoint of the Discovery Service.

Additional product features can introduce additional server-side software components, clients, databases and so on.

Cross-environment, cross-platform integration framework

Tridion Integration Framework is the primary integration point for SDL Tridion Sites to consume data and content that is external to the system. The framework provides a high degree of flexibility for your Tridion implementation and supports Connectors that can be:
  • Used with both Content Management and Content Delivery
  • Written either in Java or C# (.NET Core)

The framework also supports multiple ways for users to access content, including the Public Content API.