Built in Modules
Blogs
The Blogs module allows you to publish personal or corporate blogs. You can fully customize the access rights to the blog and let a single or multiple users to add blog posts. A single web site can contain any number of blogs. The blog posts can be retrieved through RSS feed.
Site visitors can add comments to your posts, the comments may be optionally moderated.
The design of the blog is fully customizable with your own graphics and custom content.
Booking system
The Booking system module allows you to display an event calendar together with a registration form. You can use it for both off-line and on-line events, such as conferences, web casts, presentations or community meetings. You can restrict the registration period and the capacity of the event. Once the visitors register, you can manage their registrations in the administration interface and send them a mass e-mail with event updates.
Content staging
The Content Staging module allows you to synchronize changes between staging (development/QA/testing) server and production server. It adds another level of control over published content. With content staging, the document life cycle looks like this:
- Document created
- Approved through the workflow process
- Document published on the staging server
- Review and synchronization by site manager - approval of staged content
- Document published on the live server
The synchronization also allows you to restrict the administration interface only to your local (secured) server, while the production server will only display the content. The synchronization is made through a secured web service.
Object Staging
Besides content, the Content Staging module allows you to synchronize also changes made to the web site code objects, such as page templates, CSS styles, web parts, etc. This feature greatly simplifies the deployment of changes from the development server to the live server. You can test e.g. changes of the CSS styles on your development server and then synchronize them to the live server on a button click.
E-commerce
The E-commerce solution allows you to easily build on-line stores and sell products on-line.
The E-commerce module supports:
- Product management
- Product options and configuration - e.g. t-shirt size, color and design
- Product image gallery
- Product inventory
- Order management
- Customer management
- Multiple currencies
- Configurable tax calculation based on country and state
- Discount coupons
- Discount levels
- Volume discounts
- Wish list
- Custom providers for alternative shipping and tax calculations
- Custom checkout process
- Built-in payment processors, such as PayPal, Authorize.NET
- Custom payment processors
- Reports and statistics
and other features.
We can integrate any custom payment system or choose from the built-in gateways:
- PayPal
- Authorize.NET
- customer credit - useful for customer loyalty systems
- IDEAL
We can easily integrate the e-commerce functionality into your web site using built-in web parts:
- Shopping cart
- My account (user profile, password, addresses and orders)
- Shopping cart preview
- Wish list
- Product list
- Random product
- Top N products by sale
- Similar products by sale ("customers who bought this product also bought...")
We can also customize the behavior using custom providers, such as:
- Custom product (SKU) information provider that allows you to use your existing product database
- Custom shipping calculator
- Custom tax calculator
- Custom invoice generator
and others.
Event calendar
The Event Calendar allows you to display content in the calendar style. It can be used not only for events, but also for news, articles, blog posts or any other document that contains a date field for binding with calendar.
Your CMS comes with pre-defined event calendar page template that displays events, such as conferences, seminars, on-line webinars, etc. You can easily modify this page template or use it as an example for your custom event calendar.
The Event calendar may be combined with event registration in the Booking system.
Forums
The Forums module allows you to integrate forums or comments functionality into your web site and build on-line communities.
You can create either pre-defined forums displayed on specified page or you can create "ad-hoc" forums bound to particular document that allows visitors to post comments on article or ask questions about product.
Supported features include:
- open/close forums
- moderated forums (posts need to be approved by moderator)
- secured forums - only chosen users can read/post items to the forum
- threaded/flat/tree view modes
- subscribe to new forum posts or replies to your post
- avatars (user images) and signatures
- optional CAPTCHA verification if the user is a human, not a spam robot
- forum search
Geomapping
The Geomapping module allows you to combine web content with maps. It integrates Google Maps which allows you to display any content on a map. All you need to do is to add geographic location (longitude and latitude) to the content.
It can be used for displaying:
- offices
- stores
- partner network
- friends
- real estates
etc. on the map. The integration is very easy and you do not need to understand the Google Maps API.
Image gallery
The Image Gallery module allows you to quickly publish an on-line gallery of images, such as product photos or photos of your team. All you need to do is to place the Image Gallery web part on the page, configure its parameters and upload the files. The files can be uploaded through the browser or using the batch file import module.
The gallery can display image thumbnails and detail images in required size. The thumbnails are generated automatically, so you do not need to resize them manually. Also the way the images are displayed can be easily modified and you can add some extra text or frames around the images by modifying the transformations.
Messaging
If you run a community site, your site members may need to communicate with others. They may want to send a private message that won't be visible for other members (as it is in forums). But the members do not know the e-mail address of the other members. The solution is private messaging.
Private messaging allows site members to send messages to other members. It's a "small Outlook" integrated into your web site.
Users can see their inbox, outbox, manage contact list and also block users from which they do not wish to receive messages. They can be notified by real e-mail when they receive a new message.
Newsletter
The Newsletter module helps you quickly set up a newsletter, display a sign up form and author newsletter issues. You can create either a static newsletter that are created manually by the newsletter editor or you can configure a dynamic newsletter that send the page of the given URL to all subscribers on a specified interval.
Both types of newsletters may contain external links and images. You can also customize the e-mail that are sent to the subscribers when they subscribe or unsubscribe.
Static, Template-Based Newsletters
The static newsletters are based on pre-defined templates with editable regions. The templates prepared by web designer contain the overall layout of the newsletter while the newsletter author only enters the text of the particular issue.
Dynamic Newsletters
Dynamic newsletters are sent regularly on a given period. They send an e-mail that contains the text and images from the specified page. This can be an page managed by the CMS or any external page. This type of newsletter allows you to send e.g. a weekly or monthly newsletter that contains the list of new articles published on your web site.
Newsletter Personalization
The newsletters may contain special macros, such as Chad that are replaced (merged) by subscriber's values when the e-mail is sent out. This allows you to send out personalized newsletters.
Subscribing and Unsubscribing
You can easily integrate subscription and unsubscription capability by placing the appropriate web parts on the page template. No coding required.
On-line forms
Creating on-line forms no longer requires any coding or programming! With the CMS BizForms module, you can easily create and publish simple on-line forms without programming. All you need to do is define form fields and add the form on your page. This task can be achieved by advanced end user without programming or database knowledge.
Defining form fields
For each field, you can specify:
- data type (text, long text, integer, decimal, date-time, boolean)
- field caption
- field tooltip
- style of the label and of the input control
- validation (minimum/maximum value, regular expression)
- default value
- if it accepts empty values
- if the field is displayed on the public form or only on the private form displayed to the site editors
There are several built-in field types:
- textbox
- textarea
- WYSIWYG editor
- checkbox
- drop-down list
- multiple options
- radio buttons
- e-mail address
- U.S. phone number
- International phone number
- U.S. ZIP code
You can also develop your own field types with custom validation.
Publishing form on the web site
The form can be published by content editors through the WYSIWYG editor - they only click a button, select the form and the system automatically inserts the form macro into the text. The macro is replaced by a dynamically loaded form at run-time.
You can choose what happens when the user enters form data (display text/redirect to page/continue in editing) and you can optionally send all entered values to some e-mail address or send an auto-reposponder to the person who filled-in the form.
Managing entered records
All records are stored in a standard database table. They can be viewed through the user interface and exported to an Excel file.
Flexibility and Extensibility
The form is displayed using a table layout by default. However, you can also define custom form layouts designed with your custom HTML code. If you need to perform additional actions when a form is submitted, you can place the BizForm control directly on some user control and handle its events or you can use the global event handler to run custom code.
Polls
The Polls module allows you to publish polls on your web site and get visitor opinions and feedback. Every polls may contain any number of answers and you can choose whether the visitor can choose only one answer or multiple answers.
You can choose if any visitor, authenticated users or only members of chosen roles can vote. You can configure the polls so that it displays the results only after the user votes or it doesn't display the results to site visitors at all.
Reporting
The reporting module is a universal sub-system for creating reports from data stored in the CMS database. It's used not only for the Web Analytics module, but it can also be used for reports on documents in the content repository, sales in the e-commerce module, most active forum posters and other custom reports you can create.
You can design the layout of your report and insert a column chart, pie chart, table or scalar value that display data specified by your SQL query.
You can also define a filter for your report using various fields, such as textbox, date-time picker, drop-down list and others.
The reports can be saved in report history or printed.
Wiki
The Wiki module (also called User Contributions) enables site visitors to create content directly on your web site, without having access to the CMS administration interface. It can be used in many scenarios, including:
- Partner section of your web site where partners can manage their own profile and add their own references.
- Community site where any community member can publish articles.
- Business directory where business owners can manage their profiles and contact details.
- Traditional Wiki site where site visitors can create and edit any content.
- Intranet/project portal where employees can add new content through the simplified interface without going to the administration section.
- The Wiki module supports several security configurations:
- Any visitor can edit any content (traditional Wiki)
- Only authenticated visitor (site member) can edit content (community site)
- Only document owner can edit content (partner directory, business directory)
- Only visitor granted with permissions for given document can edit it (intranet, project portal)
Web farm support
Your CMS comes with native web farm support. It provides the following features:
- It synchronizes the files uploaded to the site to all other servers. This is used only if you store the uploaded files on in the file system or in both file system and database.
- It synchronizes the changes made to the site settings on one of the servers to all the other servers.
You can use the CMS in a web farm even if you do not use the web farm synchronization module, especially if you do not store uploaded files in the file system. Then, the only limitation is that if you change the settings or page content on one of the servers, the other servers may keep using the old version of the settings in their memory/cache until the web application is restarted or cache content expires.
Please note: The web farm support doesn't replace any load-balancing or web farm management tools. You still need to use usual tools to set up a standard web farm.
Web analytics
The Web Analytics is a cruicial part of your on-line marketing strategory. It gives you information about your visitors and about the success of your web site.
This module allows you to track web site visitors and their behavior. You can get the following statistics on a yearly, monthly, daily and hourly basis:
- Visits
- Page views
- Downloads
- Invalid pages
- Referring URLs
- Conversions
- Campaigns
- Browser types
- Countries
- Tracking Campaigns
In order to get most out of your on-line campaigns, you need a system that will allows you to track the number of visitors who come from your campaigns. Since the referring URLs may not be enough for campaign tracking, the CMS Web Analytics module allows you to specify an URL parameter that contains the ID of the campaign. Then, if you link your web site using URL like http://www.mydomain.com/?campaign=banner1_large, the statistics will show you how many people came from the given banner campaign.
Moreover, when the user registers on your web site, the system stores the campaign and the URL from which the user came to your web site.
Tracking Conversions
The only fact that you get thousands of visitors doesn't mean your web site is successfull. What you really need to track is the number of conversions. A conversion is something that gives you value, such as user registration, order, sign up for your services or sign up for a newsletter. The CMS allows you to track the conversions either using built-in support (order, newsletter signup, registration) or using simple code that stores the conversion.
You can then track the number of conversions and in combination with campaign tracking, you can also see which campaigns lead to most conversions.
News
Articles
Product catalog
We can also build custom modules and integrate them into the CMS.