Whether you’re building a fun personal site or a robust online business, there are several ways you could benefit from using a database. However, many external databases and dependency-based services can introduce technical difficulties and create privacy concerns, while also taking more time and effort to implement. The Content Manager is Wix’s solution for integrating data collections with your site in a single, unified location, providing an easy-to-use interface for you to browse through and seamlessly update your content. It also allows you to store data for your site securely without the need for an external service. Here are some ways you can take advantage of the Content Manager in Wix.

Connect Data to User Interface

Connecting your collection to Dynamic Pages and Repeater elements can vastly improve your efficiency when working with layouts with recurring formatting. When you make changes to the connected collection, you can update your site’s interface without using the editor to add new elements.

Repeater Elements

If you often find yourself recreating new elements in the same container, you may benefit from connecting content to a Repeater element. With Repeaters, you can display static content in the same repeated layout which updates its interface in parallel with the collection.

Dynamic Pages

To make Repeaters even more powerful, you can link each repeating element to a Dynamic Page containing more details of the content. Where you once may have had to recreate each page every time you wanted to add a new item to your collection, Dynamic Pages allow you to populate automatically-generated pages, which can save you time and energy by automating the page creation process. Because Dynamic Pages are technically based on a single page which is populated with different content each time, you can deploy content-heavy sites without compromising load times with multiple different pages. This means that Dynamic Pages also do not count towards your Wix site’s 100 page limit, since each page is individually rendered instead of stored as a file.

Secure Your Data

Content isn’t always meant to be strictly for viewing. However, ensuring that your data is secure when allowing outsiders control of its contents can be burdensome. Wix Content Manager’s permissions system provides a simple and secure way for administrators to easily manage how people can interact with data.

Collection Permissions

On Wix sites, you are able to control who has access to each collection, as well as the scope of their access, by selecting your preferred permissions or creating your own custom access rules. If you'd like website visitors to be able to modify data, they can also securely create, update, or delete items in your collection depending on the collection’s permissions. For example, on a forum site, forum post data stored in a collection may be set to allow any user to read its content, but only registered members can create content.

To edit collection permissions, click on the three dots in the Databases section of your editor with Dev Mode turned on, and then Edit Settings.

The Additional Settings tab of the Collection Settings will let you manage the collection’s permission type.

To better understand the nuances of collection permissions and their various use cases, check out our video on the topic here.

Dataset Connector

After you set your collection’s permissions, you’ll need to add a dataset element to any pages where users might interact with your collection’s contents. The Dataset Connector allows collections to be read by Wix elements such as repeaters and tables, and determines the level of access your page has to a given collection. You can also use it to dictate how users see and interact with the collection data on the page by adjusting the privacy and organization of content specifically for that page. Where collection permissions determine who can read or modify the collection as a whole, the dataset determines where users might have read-only, write-only, or read and write permissions. The Content Manager’s layered permissions system allows you to be flexible yet secure with your data.

Advanced Data Manipulation with Velo

Wix Data

Beyond utilizing the built-in interface to view your content or sort it in a specific order, you can also get more functional flexibility through the `wix-data` API. The default filter and sort options provided by the database connector’s user interface (UI) may suffice for many use cases, but if more complex operations are needed, they can be performed using the `wix-data` API. Typically, the first text field column in your collection is used as a unique identifier in order to use each item in code. Items in the collection are formatted as a Javascript object, and most functions are returned as a Promise.

External Data

When choosing a platform to build your website, one thing to consider is how your database can be transferred to another location in the event that you want to relocate your website or work with another provider. If you are migrating existing data from an external database to a Wix site, your data can still be used with Velo or link to Dynamic Pages. You can create an external database adapter for external databases which expose their APIs in order for your Wix site to import its contents to the Content Manager as an External Collection.

Here are some guides on creating an adapter for a few popular databases:

• Google Cloud

• Microsoft Azure

• AWS RDS

You can also import and export data from Comma-Separated Value (CSV) files to use offline, import into other software, or distribute to others by using the Content Manager or Wix Code. To learn more, see the references provided here.