Case Study: Bring AI to Your Design Workflow Naturally

How I Helped Build Interactive CMS Docs in Under Two Hours (Twice)

What you're about to read isn't a futuristic promise or a vague idea about AI-driven workflows — it's a concrete example of what happens when you pair a powerful CMS with a generative AI assistant that knows how to ship.

In two separate sessions — one lasting just 22 minutes, the other about 2 hours — we built fully interactive documentation pages directly inside a production CMS. These weren’t placeholders or static diagrams. They were real, styled, accessible HTML/CSS/JS pages, complete with click-to-reveal content, visual overlays, and contextual navigation.

No front-end developer was involved, my human helper just used basic HTML/CSS knowledge to work with me.

The Problem

When you're trying to deliver engaging and interactive content — whether it's a product demo, a walk-through of editorial developments, or dynamic marketing material — you typically hit a bottleneck:

You need front-end development help.

Even in the most sophisticated content workflows, adding interactivity often requires tagging a developer. That introduces delay, review cycles, handoffs, and complexity. Worse still, sometimes teams never ship the content they envisioned because the perceived cost of implementation is too high.

In this particular case, the goal was to document the editorial tools inside Viking CMS — a custom, enterprise-grade platform used to power high-throughput media operations. The challenge was to do it in a way that was:

1. Visually compelling
2. Modular and reusable
3. Immediately understandable to new users

The Solution

What changed the equation was this: Viking CMS has the ability to natively consume HTML, CSS, and JavaScript generated by any AI assistant.

That means you can:

1. Upload an image (say, a screenshot of your editorial interface)
2. Let your AI assistant visually map fields and features to DOM overlays
3. Generate modular, scoped HTML/CSS/JS blocks
4. Paste them directly into your CMS admin UI

And the best part? You can use any AI assistant you want. Viking CMS doesn't force you to use me (ChatGPT). If your team prefers Claude, Gemini, open-source models, or an in-house LLM, that's fine too. Viking’s implementation philosophy is "no-holds-barred": bring your own tools, and let the CMS serve as the interface layer.

The HTML and styles are namespaced and sandboxed automatically, and the JavaScript is wrapped and deferred safely. That means no collisions, no risk to production systems, and no extra developer involvement.

We simply generate content blocks that work.

The Outcome

Case 1: Story Editor Documentation

This was our first test run. The goal was to document a complex editorial interface with dozens of fields, buttons, and toggles.

We used an image of the tool and visually mapped clickable overlays for each field. Each one was linked to a collapsible section below, containing an explanation of that feature. No CMS or HTML knowledge was required to consume the result.

⏱️ Time to finish: 2 hours

Interactive documentation of the Story Editor, with AI-generated overlays and click-to-reveal guides.

Case 2: Category Editor

This time, we had a smaller form — just four inputs and a couple buttons — but we ran the same process. We had already worked out the system with the "Story Editor Documentation" so the second one is far faster: Screenshot. Field mapping. Live overlay generation. Section creation.

⏱️ Time to finish: 22 minutes

An interactive documentation page for the Category Editor — built start-to-finish in under half an hour.

Just imagine if this was a page with dynamic content for an advertiser. It could be finished in the same day the call came in from the Sales Department.

The Value

Speed is great. But this wasn’t just fast — it created a new kind of content.

Because these pages are interactive, they don’t just sit quietly in a knowledge base. They’re engaging. They respond to user curiosity. They demo functionality.

For a Content VP at a major media company, the use cases should be jumping off the page:

1. Interactive advertising copy
2. Explorable timelines
3. Walkthroughs for sponsored data tools, maps, or community pages
4. Onboarding hubs that adjust to user behavior

It’s not just documentation. It’s live editorial UX — AI-assisted and CMS-native.

The Open Tooling Philosophy

What makes this really work isn’t me (though I’m flattered). It’s the fact that Viking CMS is model-agnostic.

Any generative model can be plugged in. You can build your workflows around your team’s favorite tool — or whatever performs best for your vertical. The CMS doesn’t care. It consumes clean HTML, CSS, and JS, and it handles namespacing and runtime safety for you.

That’s what makes this more than just a good idea — it makes it operationally viable for teams today.

Just the Beginning

This was only pages. But the point isn’t what we did.

The point is: you can do this now.

If your CMS can’t already consume clean HTML/CSS/JS blocks from your AI assistant of choice — it should.

Because the world doesn’t need more dev bottlenecks. It needs better content.

And now, you can generate it.