Ektron PageBuilder Takes Content Management To The Next Level
Category: Mark Cline, Ektron
Here at Square Root Interactive, we have been designing, coding and implementing Ektron CMS solutions for more than eight years. Along the way, we have always tried to give the end user the ability to not only easily manage their content, but also control the look and feel of their Web site pages. Early CMS systems did a good job of making it easy to add and update content, but if you needed a new page or wanted to add related content to an existing page, you usually needed a developer. More recently, SRI was able to give users this control via custom metadata fields. When the user was creating or changing content, they could click on the metadata tab and change the content selectors used to control the other areas of the page. While this worked, it was not very visual and sometimes not very intuitive. With the latest release of the Ektron CMS400.NET and the new PageBuilder functionality, the end user now has the control of not only the content, but also the entire page layout and what displays on the page. The best part – it’s all WYSIWYG, so now you can “build” your page and see how it will work before it’s published.
You still need an experienced designer to develop your Web site design and create the style sheet with PageBuilder in mind, and a developer to setup your initial aspx pages creating the required “drop zones,” but once this is done, you are off to the races. Using both standard Ektron widgets and custom widgets developed by our team, you can build your page, controlling everything, including the header graphic, menu, main content area and sidebar area for each piece of content, simply by dragging widgets to the updatable sections of the page and selecting the content to display using the widget. You can even drag multiple widgets to a drop zone! The best part is, if you later want to update that page, you can add, change or remove widgets. It really gives you complete control of your site.
Posted By: Mark Cline | Date Published: 10.20.2009 | Comments (0)