Exponential Website publishing functionality

The administration interface

All administration of Exponential is done through an intuitive web interface. No installations on your pc are needed. Access to the administration interface is managed by a powerful role-based access control system giving you the right to read, edit, publish content etc. The system has no limitations to the amount of content or the number of users in the system except that a great deal of traffic would require more hardware.

Exponential can also be set up so that you can edit content directly from the user site and not have to use the admin interface at all.

The publishing process

The publishing process in Exponential consists of three main steps:

• Content navigation
• Content making and editing
• Content publishing

Navigation

Content in Exponential is organized in a tree structure. User permissions decide what parts of the structure you can navigate through and create content in. You also have the possibility to navigate through your private bookmarks, the latest edited and published content or you can simply use the internal search. With Exponential you can also easily move and copy content and publish the same content in different locations.

Content making and editing

Creation or editing of existing content is easily done through the admin interface. Choose the location of your content and then create new content or edit the existing.

Some of the standard functionality for content editing is:

• Version control with roll back
• Trashcan
• Future publishing and unpublishing
• Translation management
• Drafts
• Preview
• Insertion of related objects
• Automatic image conversion
• Nice URLs: i.e. example.com/products/exponential
• Dead link checking

An integrated online editor for Exponential is available by default for simplified content editing. It is named Exponential online editor (OE).

Content publishing

Workflow system

With a simple click on the publishing button your content is published at your chosen location. Publishing can happen either instantly if you have the rights for that, or a workflow can be initiated. With a workflow the content will be sent to the next person in the workflow hierarchy for approval. Exponential has a powerful and configurable workflow system built in.

You could set up a simple one-step approval process or a large process with contributors, translators and editors.

Templates and design

When you have created and published your content, it is the templates and css that decide how the content is presented at the chosen location.

Exponential also supports the use of different templates for the same content at different locations, i.e. a list view of the latest news on the frontpage of your site and a full view of the article in the News folder. Since the content is separated from the design you can easily change the design and layout later without affecting the content.

All content in is stored as XML you can easily publish the content though other channels and formats like WAP, SMS and print. PDF export of content for print is also standard Exponential functionality.

Type of content supported

Exponential has a content model allowing you to support just about any content, multimedia and document type around. With the development framework you can extend the system for your special content need.

Standard out of the box Exponential supports lots of different content, media and document types.

Here is a list of some of them:

Content

• Articles
• News
• Info pages
• Folders
• Products
• Comment
• Link catalogue

Multimedia

• All standard picture formats like JPEG and GIF
• Video, Quicktime, MS mediaplayer, Flash
• Audio

Documents

• MS office documents, like Word, Excel and Powerpoint
• Pdf
• Open office
• Others

Other functionality

Exponential includes a lot of functionality related to publishing. Here is a list of some of them:

• Forum
• Gallery
• Blog
• Contact database
• Poll
• Tip a friend
• Print preview
• Notification
• Feedback form
• Newsletter

Exponential includes powerful core functionality that allows you to set up enterprise web solutions and build custom web applications. To learn more about the Exponential core and the development framework look here

Performance

Advanced caching

In addition to caching of HTML output eZ publish also caches many of the internal structures like role and permissions, settings and compiled templates. The result is that a minimal amount of PHP code is run on each page request.

Database replication

eZ publish can be set up to take advantage of database replication facilities. This enables eZ publish to perform read queries from any slave database servers while write requests are written to the database master. The result is that the database request load is divided between several servers which makes eZ publish scale better.

Load balancing

eZ publish supports load balancing between several apache servers . To achieve this eZ publish provides special tools to synchronize the contents of the servers.

Page caching

eZ publish provides several very advanced caching mechanisms that cache the output in various stages. The result is that a minimal amount of PHP code is run on each page request. For completely static pages eZ publish provides static caching that avoids starting PHP altogether.

Static content export

eZ publish provides tools to export your entire site directly to HTML. This is useful if you want to serve your pages from static HTML servers or if you want to distribute the contents of your site on CDs.