California XF Docs
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Basic Concepts

The platform

The California Xperience Framework, or California XF, or CXF,  is a broad term that encompasses all components that make it possible to achieve your marketing goals.

The California XF API is a set of HTTP interfaces that allows clients to interact with the California XF platform. There are public and private APIs and this is explained with detail in the implementations manual<link: implementations manual>.

The California XF UI is the official user interface that allows you to have full control over the California XF platform, and uses the CXF API under the hood. The UI is accessible through the domain name https://your-project.mints.cloud.

 

Modules

California XF can be used in a wide variety of use cases and its many capabilities have been grouped in Modules, which are:

  • People: This is the place where you can manage all your leads, contacts and visitors.
  • Content: This module allows you to manage content that is consumed by your contacts. Content can be published on public communication platforms such as websites or mobile apps, but also on private channels such as email.
  • Store: This is the module that manages your business' ecommerce. Here you manage your product catalog, prices, orders, discounts and more.
  • Marketing: This module allows the configuration of automated tasks based on triggers, and other marketing tasks.
  • Config: This is the place to set configuration parameters that shape the behavior of the platform. 
  • Profile: This is where you can see the information that affects you personally, your pending tasks, notifications and more.

Modules help to keep objects organized in the system, but bear in mind that objects from one module are closely related to objects in other modules.

 

Objects

Objects or object types are digital abstractions of real life things, and are the core pieces of information that the platform uses as data source. The platform has a predefined set of object types, each one designed to store a digital model of a real life item, such as a customer, a blog article, or a product in your store.

For example, a contact is a predefined object that allows you to store the information of a person: a lead, a customer, an author, or a speaker at a conference can all be modeled as contacts.  A story is another example of an object, it allows you to store any item that is mainly represented by a text with optional media: a blog article, a news article, a business case are all examples of stories.

The most important object type in the system is contact, since this object is most likely to store information about your actual and potential customers, and hence represents the core of the data model of the platform.

 

Users

A user is anyone that has access to the California XF platform. To be able to use the platform, the user must be active, and have a valid access token, either a password or a magic link.

Only administrators with the right privilege can create other users.

It is important to note the distinction between user and contact. In many contexts, a contact can be a user of the CXF platform if there is a client (e.g. an implementation project) that allows contacts to sign in and have an active session; in such a context we could use the work contact or user indistinctively. A contact will never be able to sign in into the California XF UI, because only users can do so.