How to make the most of the new website.

Thu, 09/11/2008 - 19:28 |  hdanzl

Well, as you can see we've a new website since a few weeks now. But it's not just a shiny new look but a complete new system that servers all content dynamically. After trying several systems we opted for a modern open source Content Management System (CMS) called Drupal.

Dynamic content

Drupal is the backbone of the site, but we wanted more, so we did some custom development and integrated it with VBulletin Forums (for a news gateway and archive) and Mantis Bugtracker.

The combination of these three allows us to provide you with easy content updates, like documentation additions/changes, blogs posts and automated updating of product versions and news. To make it easy for you, we also provide RSS feeds that will inform you about all additions and updates to pages and blogs.

Subscribe to an RSS feed.

We currently provide a main RSS feed for site wide changes/updates (Updated pages will be marked with a "Updated:" prefix in the header). This includes all product updates, product information pages, documentation books and blogs. Additionally we have separate RSS feeds for the various blogs which you can access on the main page of every such blog. If the need for other detail feeds arises we will make them available.

Register & Login to the web site

While we don't enforce registration and all content is accessible anonymously, registration has several advantages:

  • Issue Tracker: When you are logged in you can report issues, subscribe to issues for getting notifications on updates and the possibility to store your own profiles to make reporting of issues faster and easier.
  • Newsgroup Gateway: When you're logged in you get full advanced search access to the ng archive spanning tens of thousands of posts. You also get full tracking possibilities, can monitor threads with mail notification and store your own profile. The web gateway is a full 2-way implementation and you can use it instead of the nntp newsreader if you wish so.

    Detail Search

    Please note the search link in the left or top menu area (no, not the search box & button), which allows you to search for content in different areas of the web site:

    • Website, Documentation & FAQ
    • Newgroups
    • Issues
    • Wiki

    (We will make a separate search for the manuals only available soon.)

    Future?

    Du to the modular concept of the CMS we will be adding new features available. The first planned new feature is a repository for custom SQL functions. Further we're thinking of IRC chat integration and of course integration of the secure customer pages.

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