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 and drag-and-drop
  • Uploaded images are automatically filed in the site’s folder structure
  • On-demand resizing, cropping and rotation of uploaded images, with the output cached for best performance
  • Embed inline video players from popular third-party services at any size, using the clip’s URL only
  • Support for normalised image output, enabling square and rectangular aspect ratios to be displayed with consistent visual weight
  • Built-in ‘hotspotting’ of uploaded images, allowing metadata to be attached to points or bounding boxes within the image
  • Support for ‘retina’ images using srcset to automatically serve hi-res images to hi-DPI devices
Workflow
  • Any number of administrator 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  • Preview draft/unpublished content as it will appear once published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
  • Ability to re-use (or move) content between sections by sharing (or moving) ‘objects’
  • Support for multiple administrators and page/object locking to prevent accidental overriding of another editor’s changes
  • Audit history maintained for all editing actions, including a ‘diff’-style view to identify changes between versions
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
  • Automated token generation/redemption for enabling user registration by unique code
  • Push registration information and updates to MailChimp or Sumo Pro to keep eDM lists in sync
Modular Approach
  • Flexible blog, commenting and forum modules
  • E-commerce module (see below)
  • Comprehensive form validation, including multi-page forms
  • Google Maps module for adding location data to objects
  • Geo-location module for targeting content to user’s location
  • Integrates with Sumo (and other third-party platforms) for email campaign management
  • Social module for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (enables republishing of content from these platforms using your look and feel, instead of having to use each platform’s native widgets)
E-Commerce Module
  • Shopping cart and checkout module, with integration points for Payment Express, PayPal and Stripe
  • Support for order tracking, inventory levels, sales reports, automated email receipts, multiple currencies, calculation of shipping costs based on delivery location and/or order size, and more.
  • NEW React-based cart and checkout components that can be styled to match your site’s type and colour palettes.
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
  • Clustering of data and assets across multiple servers
  • Support for storing site assets in an external CDN such as Amazon S3
Security
  • User-based administrator logins with access-level control
  • Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) protection in forms engine
  • Successfully 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 from available options
  • Ability to display alternative page layouts and navigation options to individual regions
  • Full 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
  • Editable keywords and metadata at a per-page level
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
  • Wrapper classes offer more detailed business logic if required
  • Supermodel integrates with mobile apps as easily as with HTML websites, using JSON or XML for data exchange