About Supermodel
Supermodel is the in-house content management platform of web standards and iOS design and development studio, Cactuslab .
Supermodel is made available free of licensing charges for client projects, but is not available to other implementers at this time.
Please to arrange a demonstration.
Supermodel Technology
Supermodel is a 2-tier J2EE enterprise-level content
management solution designed to make websites easily maintainable regardless of front-end design
considerations. Supermodel offers a comprehensive web-based “back office” admininstration interface
enabling site owners to control all aspects of their web site, including text, images, multimedia
assets, user-generated content and more. Supermodel is most often deployed under Linux using a
Tomcat/Apache stack backed onto a PostgreSQL database (Oracle and MS SQL also supported). Cactuslab
will host your project, or provide assistance to clients wishing to host their own sites.
Interface Approach
Easy-to-use, web-based content management platform
Allows one or more site administrators to maintain a website without specialised tools or knowledge of HTML/CSS
Familiar tree interface for exploring content structure
Single click from any content page to its editing interface
Drag and drop to re-arrange content order
WYSIWYG editor for long-form content
Search by keyword or find content by data type
Image and Video Handling
Upload images inline within the admin interface, with support for multiple file selection
Uploaded images are automatically filed in the site’s folder structure
Templates support on-demand resizing, cropping and rotation of uploaded images, with the output cached for best performance
NEW Templates support embedding of video players from popular third-party services at any size, using the clip’s URL onlySupport for normalised output of images, enabling square and rectangular aspect ratios to be displayed at a consistent visual weight
Built-in “hotspotting” of uploaded images, allowing metadata to be attached to points or bounding boxes within the image
Workflow
Any number of approval levels configurable by implementer
Default setup allows for “draft” and “published” content modes
Preview draft/unpublished content as it will appear once published
Content may be automatically added or removed from a site at pre-determined times
User Management
Comprehensive user management and reporting module
Expose editable account pages with any number of additional fields
Confirm new user accounts via email/URL workflow
NEW Automated token generation/redemption for enabling user registration by unique code
Modular Approach
Flexible blog/commenting/forum modules
Comprehensive form validation, including multi-page forms
Voting and polls module
Google Maps module for adding location data to objects
Geo-location module for targeting content to user’s location
Shopping cart and checkout module, with integration points for DPS and PayPal , order tracking, inventory support, sales reports, automated receipts, multiple currencies and more.
Integrates with Sumo for email campaign management
Compression and Performance
Performance-focused approach for optimal content delivery
Utilises YSlow’s recommendations for server performance tuning
Automatic gzipping of all site assets and markup
Built-in minification and concatenation of CSS and JavaScript assets
Parallelised download of site assets via multiple subdomains
NEW Clustering of data and assets across multiple servers
Security
User-based administrator logins with access-level control
NEW Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) protection in forms engineSuccessfully passed several audits prior to corporate deployments
Reports and Tools
Implementer can create reports based on site transactions and analytics
Import and export site data via XLS files
Interface to upload files and image assets
FTP access for high-volume asset uploads
Multiple Languages
Any number of additional languages configurable by implementer
Automatically choose language to show appropriate content to visitors based on their locale setting, or allow the visitor to choose their preferred language
Ability to display alternative page layouts and navigation options to individual regions
Improved internationalisation and UTF-8 support in both editing interface and site templates
Administrator control to display any combination of additional languages as fields within the admin interface
Watch a demonstration screencast of this feature
Search Engine Optimisation
Automatically generates plain-English page URLs, which can be edited within the admin interface
Remembers all past URLs for each page, allowing these to be changed without compromising existing inbound links
Places no constraints on the form of a site’s markup
Technology Stack
Platform-independent implementation using Java Enterprise standards, SQL database and Java web application server
Runs on Apache and Tomcat with ImageMagick, HTML Tidy and other server-side extensions
Tested with PostgreSQL, MySQL, MS SQL, and Oracle
Implementers use a simple tagging language to control logic, site structure and output of content
Java wrapper classes can be used to implement more detailed business logic if required
Supermodel integrates with Flash as easily as with HTML websites, using XML for data exchange