Sitellite PHP Web CMS Review

Since January 2001, Canadian web services company Simian Systems, Inc has marketed their own brand of Web Content Management System called the Sitellite CMS.

Simian recently released the latest version of their Web CMS, the Sitellite 4.2 Content Management System, and CMSWire has had a change to poke under the covers and speak in depth with Simian staff.

Product Overview
Sitellite is both a web content management system and an application development framework built in PHP. The typical database back-end is MySQL, although the Enterprise Edition of Sitellite offers other options, including Oracle, SQL Server, and other open source databases such as PostgreSQL.

Sitellite comes in three different flavors: the free Open-source Edition, the Professional Edition, and the Enterprise Edition. Aside from price, the various editions differ on feature sets (Sitellite Modules) and on database connectivity options.

Content Management
The primary content entities in Sitellite are web pages, though the Professional version ships with a number of other types, including Web Files, FAQs, News Stories, Calendar Events, etc., and custom types may be defined by the PHP adept.

There are many ways to reuse both content and dynamic modules in Sitellite. Unfortunately, the ground to cover there is a bit too broad for this review.

The primary content management tasks involve creating and/or editing “web pages”, managing page-level metadata, defining the page hierarchy and performing review and approval processes. Once a content editor is logged-in, they may either pull the page to edit from a list in the “Control Panel” or they can browse the website and click on in-context buttons to edit a specific content block.

The content life cycle is managed both by a simple, linear workflow and by a content scheduler that can publish or un-publish pages based upon specified dates.

Workflow rights are defined by Sitellite Role permissions. Users are assigned both a site-wide Sitellite Role and a site-wide Sitellite “Team”. Content is owned by exactly one Team. So if a given user is a member of the Team owning a specific page, they then have permissions on that page as defined by their site-wide role. Role permissions, content statuses, and teams are all fairly customizable.

Content Editing
Sitellite 4.2 has an intuitive content editor interface, using the XED 2 (pronounced Zed) WYSIWYG editor. After logging in to your website, XED 2 allows content managers to edit all the images, pictures, graphics and text on their website and even allows copy and pasting text from their favorite word processor.

XED keeps a record of all of your changes and allows you to go back previous versions at any time, and also includes a 25 level undo/redo per web editing session. Sitellite 4.2 Professional and Enterprise editions also offers web novices the freedom to add new navigation at the click of a button, add tracking metrics, polls, discussion forums, Blogs, event calendars, manage email-based marketing campaigns, side shows, and automate the publishing of your changes at a future time and date.

The content editing interface allows you to specify content metadata, custom page titles, and as an option, user-friendly aliases for each page. Sitellite has a native concept of membership, which allows you to restrict content access on a page or site section level.

Application Framework
The Sitellite Application Framework (SAF) is the web application engine behind the Sitellite CMS. The Sitellite CMS can be accurately construed as a CMS application built on top of the Sitellite Application Framework and nearly in parallel with many of the Sitellite CMS Add-on Modules. Things are in fact a touch more complicated than this, but this is a pretty fair depiction of the architecture.

Sitellite PHP Web CMS Review

Since January 2001, Canadian web services company Simian Systems, Inc has marketed their own brand of Web Content Management System called the Sitellite CMS.\n\nSimian recently released the latest version of their Web CMS, the Sitellite 4.2 Content Management System, and CMSWire has had a change to poke under the covers and speak in depth with Simian staff.

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