PluggedOut CMS

PluggedOut CMS is a flexible and powerful content management system for PHP/MySQL based systems, tried, tested and trusted in enterprise level systems.

It provides rich multi user management of big websites through an extensive admin interface.- Flexibility
CMS has been designed from the ground up for flexibility and extensibility. It provides a loose management and delivery structure for website content; perfect for fast moving dynamic sites.
- Administration Interface
CMS has an extensive thin client administration and content authoring interface, meaning that users do not require any technical database or web server administration knowledge to make changes to their website or intranet.
- Separation of Content from Pages
Each “page” in CMS is a collection of pieces of content; meaning content can be re-used throughout multiple pages (menus and advertisements are a good example).
- Multi-User Administration, Authoring and Security of Content
CMS has multi-user administration, authoring and approval of pages and content, with an extensive security model to allow specific groups of users subsets of features on subsets of content (i.e. a user may only be able to view, or edit particular types of page or content within the site).
- Timed Content
Pieces of content can be configured to “switch on” between pre-defined time periods. The uses of this are many and varied; with examples of the most obvious uses being the cycling of advertisements, and the publishing of financial reports at specific times and dates.
- Separation of Content from Style through Templates
Content, PageContent, and Page Templates. Each piece of content may have a template applied to it (casting that content in a particular style, or with particular decoration). In addition, the instance of a piece of content on a page can have a template applied to it, and the page itself can have a template applied to it.
- Workflow Approval of Content
The security model can be configured such that an “author” may be able to generate content of a particular type, but that content may require approval by a user of a different “type” of user before the content becomes “live”.
- Ad-Hoc Content MetaData
Although in most cases content and style can be separated through the use of templates, CMS has a powerful “metadata” facility to overcome the situations where this isn’t enough. Users can specify multiple pieces of data to be dropped into a pre-designed template at defined points. A good example of this is the generation of tables with data inside them. The designer creates an HTML table which is stored in a content template - the author then just specifies what should be put into the table (i.e. they don’t have to know anything about HTML).
- Page and Content Property Fields
As well as “ad-hoc” metadata, CMS allows you to define custom property fields on both pages and content - which can be used for both searching and replacement in templates. The custom property fields can use all common data types, with full validation of their content at data-entry time.
- Scripted Content
Where content needs to be dynamically pulled from external systems, CMS has the option of calling scripted functions to generate content on-the-fly. This could be used for a multitude of facilities - fetching data from financial systems, providing highly interactive and/or targeted forms, retrieving documents from Document Management Systems… the reasons are endless.
- Page Caching
Pages have the option of being cached. You can choose to cache particular pages within a site - meaning that the engine will pre-construct and store a complete version of the page for fast access. Careful use of caching dramatically reduces response times for complex pages, and reduce stress on your web servers - meaning you get huge increases in overall website/intranet performance without requiring hardware and/or networking and infrastructure investment.
- Document Management
You can store documents within CMS for easy access within web pages, and keep associated metadata alongside them along with all the functionality you would expect with a document management system - document types, checkin, checkout, document security and so on.
- API
CMS has an http based API, allowing pages and content to be authored by another computer system. This becomes the real lever to integrate CMS with existing EDRMS and DMS systems - where you might have an over-night process to build your internal or external website dynamically according to content within your own systems.