When a large retail company in the U.S., with a nationwide network of franchises, needed to modernize and scale its digital presence, Solvisse and dotCMS partnered to make it happen - replatforming thousands of websites and delivering a unified, scalable experience for as many individual partner groups.
At Solvisse, we specialize in custom software development, seamless integrations, and high-performance digital solutions. This project offered an opportunity to reimagine a massive ecosystem with complex business needs. Over the course of 12 months, and in close collaboration with the client’s internal team, we delivered a solution that empowers both brand managers and partners to thrive in a competitive digital industry.
This article reveals how we leveraged dotCMS, a leading headless CMS, to build a scalable architecture. From centralized content governance to personalized site control at the local level, this platform now supports over 3000 websites - each unique yet brand-consistent.
Understanding the Challenge
The client operates across multiple business lines, including a vast network of independent partner groups. From solo operators to large teams, each group sells curated services and requires a tailored yet brand-aligned digital footprint.
The complexity of managing this type of distributed network is immense. Multitenancy, scalability, and brand control must all be addressed while still offering individual users the ability to manage their unique digital spaces.
Our Mission Was Threefold:
Modernize the look and feel of every site, ensuring visual polish, ADA compliance, and SEO optimization.
Replatform all sites onto dotCMS for centralized, scalable content management.
Empower partners with tools that offer flexibility while keeping them within a well-defined brand framework.
This wasn’t just a technology upgrade. It was a strategic overhaul designed to future-proof the organization’s digital ecosystem and support long-term growth.
The Team That Made It Happen
To tackle the challenge, we assembled a diverse and seasoned team: full-stack developers, a UI/UX designer, QA specialists, a software architect, and a project manager. While new to dotCMS, our developers quickly upskilled, focusing the first eight weeks on discovery, POCs, and establishing shared best practices with the client team.
As the project scaled, we added a dedicated front-end developer to ensure visual fidelity and high performance across the network.
Bridging the Gap: Why We Built PartnerCMS
A standard CMS is often sufficient for a small company managing just one or two websites with a tech-savvy team. You build the sites, train the staff, and they manage content updates directly through the CMS interface. However, early in the project, we realized that using the default dotCMS user interface didn’t align with the needs of partners looking to customize their individual websites.
Rather than forcing them into a workflow that wasn’t intuitive for them, we built a custom application using dotCMS as the underlying content repository - PartnerCMS.
This platform would provide a seamless UX tailored to their needs, while also handling security and governance at a granular level for each partner. To function effectively, PartnerCMS needed to communicate with dotCMS via API, acting as an intermediary between the agents and the core content management system.
At a high level, our initial blueprint looked like this:
How it Works:
Partners manage content exclusively through PartnerCMS, which offers a streamlined, intuitive experience.
Brand Managers retain full access to dotCMS to manage assets, global content, and centralized updates.
A clear content governance structure ensures agents can customize their sites within pre-approved brand parameters.
A key design decision made this separation possible: content managed within PartnerCMS would be mutually exclusive from the content controlled centrally by the brand managers. This clear division of responsibilities allowed for both flexibility at the individual partner level and brand consistency across all websites .
The result? This approach gave us the best of both worlds - scalability and governance for the brand, alongside independence and usability for the partners. Every user gets exactly what they need without compromising brand integrity.
Looking Ahead
This project was about more than delivering thousands of websites. It was about building a sustainable foundation for growth. With dotCMS at the core and PartnerCMS tailored to real user needs, this ecosystem now empowers thousands of individual partners while ensuring centralized governance and brand consistency.
Solvisse and dotCMS have proven the ability to execute at enterprise scale, and this is just the beginning.