Publisha – a brief overview

What is it?

Publisha is a fully featured set of tools that allows companies to easily and effectively manage their web sites, intranets and extranets. It allows non-technical staff to keep their content up to date via a simple yet powerful inline WYSIWYG editing system. It also comes with a fully featured archiving system as well as a whole host of backend tools to allow users to manage their website.

Technology (Backend)

The backend is built on a mixture of .NET technology and MS SQL. The prerequisites for installation are .NET platform, IIS, and ASP.NET (all standard software on most Microsoft web servers) plus MS SQL.

Technology (Client Facing)

The client facing software is presented via a HTML interface. The only requirement is that the users have IE 7+ installed running on PC. Note that the customer facing websites are cross browser complient.

Key Features

Below is a brief summary of some of the functionality in no particular order:

  • Software is installed once on the server. No installation process required for the software users. The Publisha user interface is 100% web based.
  • Publisha utilises your existing technology framework without the need for you to change your architecture or coding standards. If you use Active Server Pages then carry on using Active Server Pages. If you use Cold Fusion then carry on using Cold Fusion. Our technology exists as a separate layer and is independent of the technology used to build the web sites.
  • Our unique tagging system allows webmasters to rapidly define parts of the page that are Publishable thus ensuring that content editors cannot breach the integrity of the page design.
  • True WYSIWYG editing. Our technology using true inline WYWIWYG editing. The content is edited within the web browser itself so you truly see what your edits will look like. It also unlocks the power of cascading style sheets by giving access to the users, without them having to understand the underlying complexities.
  • Easy to use. If you’ve used a word processor, then you’re already 90% there.
  • Powerful archiving feature. Every time a web page or resource is modified, the changes are archived. These archives can be searched, restored, and viewed at any time.
  • Fine grained permissions. You can control who has rights to edit different areas of the web site. You can even control what functionality you allow a user to see.
  • Rich set of file management tools. Creating, modifying, moving, deleting web pages and resources couldn’t be easier. In addition the fine grained permissions can define the way in which each user can manage their web pages.
  • Powerful publishing tools. Full work flow and approvals process module available for those who require it.
  • Powerful web based XML editor also allows webmasters to expose navigation and control elements to content editors. This means that the content editors can make edits to navigation or look and feel just as easily as to the content. Again, the fine grained permissions can control access to this functionality.
  • In addition, our special “sticky” APIs allow content editors to define and control different navigation for different areas of the site.
  • Publisha comes with a host of tools to ensure website integrity; such as link checker; html sweeper (useful for cleaning up HTML generated by Word documents).
  • Pages are locked during an edit to prevent multiple users trying to make edits at the same time.
  • Smart upload feature that will automatically scale and compress images so that they conform to site wide standards.
  • Comment generator. Enter comments about web pages (or particular version of web page).
  • Special tag to allow office documents to be embedded into a web page by creating a link to a document within the company’s CMS system. In other words, automatically convert office documents (Word, PowerPoint, Excel) into HTML and paste them into the web page without any manual input. When the underlying word document is edited, the web page will be automatically updated.
  • Import tools.
  • Web farm module to allow one-to-many publishing.
  • Allow publishing from hosted platform to live website over the web.
  • The HTML generated by the WYSIWYG editor is XHTML compliant.