t4 SiteManager 7: Accessibility, WebDAV, Cross Browser Support

By David Roe (@druadh20) Nov 18, 2009 Comments

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Twelve months, €900,000 in research and a whole lot of feedback from its partners through its recently launched extranet and Irish-based TERMINALFOUR (news, site) has a completely new edition of its enterprise grade web content management system.

Site Manger 7.0, the company says is its most ambitious piece of technology to date, and represents a major upgrade to v6.2, which was released in November 2008.

Site Manager 7.0

With Site Manager 7.0, the company says they are now at the forefront of content management provision for the university sector, which is no small claim given that the company moved State-side in March with the opening of their Boston HQ and is already competing with other Web CMS providers for attention.

When v6.2 was launched last year it came with no less than 79 different upgrades or new features. This time around even TERMINALFOUR seems unwilling to guess at how many upgrades they have included.

With feedback from web developers across 50 third-level institutions around the world, v7.0 offers multi-platform support and enables thousands — as opposed to hundreds — of content creators around the world to collaborate on projects by enabling web content management servers talk to each other. It is also supported across all browsers, the company says.

Site Manager 7 Features

That's all very general though, let’s look at some of the specifics.

User Interface

One of the things that is really making TERMINALFOUR just about bust with pride this time around is the new user interface. Terminal_direct edit_2009.jpg
TERMINALFOUR's Direct Edit

While they didn't dump the old one, they have upgraded it quite considerably using Ajax functionality that effectively reduces the number of clicks needed per page and consequently the number of page refreshes needed to make a page.

Although there are a number of improvements that are immediately obvious, there are hundreds of others in menus, labels and features that are not and which are the result of direct feedback from their community.

Shared Folders via WebDav

For a Web CMS working across numerous locations, the ability for users to share folders is critical. Site Manager v7.0 has been upgraded to allow users access to content repositories and media libraries, either partially, or entirely, depending on the level of permissions assigned.

Apart from the obvious advantage of being able to see all necessary content to complete a task, this feature also enables users to publish content from common desktop applications using the
‘save as’ function’.

Terminal_preview in media lib_2009.jpg
TERMINALFOUR Media Library

Another element of the ‘shared’ functions is it enables web developers to share other assets such as JavaScript files, stylesheets and images from software like Dreamweaver or Microsoft Visual Studio.

Terminal_site structure_2009.jpg
TERMINALFOUR's site structure enables easy file sharing