http://www.vanillacms.com/rss.php Vanilla is a lightweight Content Management System built around PHP, MySQL and jQuery. Its speed and portability make it an ideal candidate for white label CMS solutions. en-gb Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:43:41 GMT Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:43:41 GMT http://www.vanillacms.com tech@netstepper.com tech@netstepper.com http://www.vanillacms.com/?pID=1 http://www.vanillacms.com/?pID=1 // White Label CMS. Vanilla is a lightweight Content Management System built around PHP, MySQL, AJAX and jQuery. Its focus on speed, portability and reliability makes it an ideal candidate for white label CMS solutions. Most importantly, Vanilla is incredibly flexible and easy to use. Features include: Unlimited parent>child architecture Fast FULLTEXT search engine Flexible layout options for designers Fast - thanks to no page refreshing Built-in AJAX file management Supports PHP page creation - unlimited scope Custom META data for every page Familiar WYSIWYG editor Supports custom Smart Tags for easy data insertion Easy to use Media Gallery with bulk upload Handy Autosave Feature W3C valid output Create and include sidebars on the fly Comprehensive statistics plugin Automatic navigation menu Drag and drop content sorting Supports multiple user roles with Access Control Friendly URLs Built-in RSS features Ideal white label CMS base Unique FooBank™ code framework ...and much much more! View all features... http://www.vanillacms.com/?pID=10 http://www.vanillacms.com/?pID=10 Familiarity breeds content. Below is a screenshot of the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editing page and the word-processor type toolbar. The shot below was actually taken whilst creating this very page. Click for a larger view. The toolbar will be familiar to anyone that's ever used software such as Microsoft's Word or Office. Toolbar Features Format the colour and size of text, paragraphs, titles etc. Easily insert links, images, documents and files Paste from Word and preserve formatting Find and replace function Insert Flash and multimedia objects Present tabular data View HTML element placeholders such as p, div and li Edit in source code mode for advanced scripting Insert a one-click slideshow Insert web forms for back-end processing Switch between simple and advanced toolbars ...and much more Additional Page Options Along with custom tools on the toolbar - which is enough to create rich, dynamic content on its own - every page also has a host of additional options governing its content and behaviour. You can also configure: The page's title The friendly title (used for friendly URLs) Parent page Custom META tags Page tags (for search hooks) Comprehensive navigation options Breadcrumb options Whether to display tags and date etc. Whether to flag for RSS inclusion Whether the page is active (live) Whether the page is hidden (for custom error pages etc.) Whether the page can contain Smart Tags Whether the page contains raw PHP code Sidebar options with drag and drop sorting Access control based on user roles ...and more! With such flexibility, there's no excuse not to have dynamic and fresh content on all your pages - and all without the need to worry about linking everything up - it's all taken care of automagically by Vanilla's first-class content and navigation architecture. http://www.vanillacms.com/?pID=182 http://www.vanillacms.com/?pID=182 Public Distribution We've had a busy year, not just building Vanilla, but we're finally streamlining the codebase and squishing those inevitable cross-browser bugs (*cough* Internet Explorer *cough*).  We're also currently working on setting up a demo installation at a separate domain so folks can test-drive Vanilla in various controlled environments.  This should be ready by Spring 2010 with a view to an official launch and 'in the wild' distribution by summer 2010.  We're doing this in order to try and release the most bug-free product possible. We also need to finalise testing on the latest incarnations of Safari and Opera. A Word on Licensing We're also receiving a growing number of enquiries regarding the licensing schema that'll be attached to Vanilla.  We've thought long and hard about this and at this moment in time - and as Vanilla is still strictly in a beta state - we're only offering hosted solutions in order to keep an eye on things and iron out creases that may occur in a production environment.  There are also a few extra features that we intend to bundle into the core distribution (verbose logging, database restoration, a discrete blog and social networking plugin to name the main ones). When released, Vanilla will be a paid-for, licensed product - there will not be a free or open source version (at least not for the foreseeable future). Watch this space. http://www.vanillacms.com/?pID=68 http://www.vanillacms.com/?pID=68 SEO-friendly URLs What is a friendly URL? A friendly URL looks like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/about-us A regular URL looks like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php?pID=1 Friendly URLs are more logical, more memorable and they give search engines something more semantic to get their teeth into. With a single click, Vanilla can switch between friendly and regular URLs. This is achieved with a cunning mixture of Apache directives and jQuery which converts every relevant link, at runtime, to a friendly one. Compared to many other friendly URL techniques, ours seems to be less hassle, more flexible and more reliable. Not just the URL... Vanilla also parses the navigation menu and all the internal links within the current page's content, and if it finds any, it'll convert those to friendly links too.  Coupled with the ability to drop internal links (links that point to another page on your website) into your content with a single click, creating link-rich content which is semantically friendly has never been so simple.  It's surprising how much these small features speed up your overall workflow. Graceful Degradation If a regular URL (using page ID) is typed into the address bar or if the visitor has JavaScript turned off, the system automatically falls back to using regular URLs. This fall-back also occurs if the page has no friendly title saved (although this should very rarely happen as they are generated automatically - similar to page slugs in WordPress). http://www.vanillacms.com/?pID=46 http://www.vanillacms.com/?pID=46 Extending with PHP If you're a developer, integrating custom routines and scripts into an existing content management system can be a pain in the back-end. With Vanilla, you can designate pages that are pure PHP code, thus hooking into any external script, function or include. Examples of such pages might be calendars, calling and displaying database recordsets, MySQL-powered widgets or feeding dynamic back-end XML to Flash widgets. Remember, using this method will allow you to tap straight into your server's OS and perform any number of server-side functions. You can mix PHP and regular HTML within these special pages. For a better chance of successful W3C validation, you may also want to URL encode certain entities such as ampersands, currency symbols and punctuation symbols. For safety, all PHP-only pages are locked down via multiple security mechanisms. Custom Include Method If you'd rather create your pages offline, Vanilla CMS also supports the integration of custom HTML or PHP files on a per-page basis. This method could be used to provide the framework for a template system. Read more about custom HTML files here. Further Extension with FooBank You can further extend Vanilla via the The FooBank™ System.   http://www.vanillacms.com/?pID=96 http://www.vanillacms.com/?pID=96 {Smart Tags} Yet another template-like feature of Vanilla is the ability to place 'smart tags' within your page. A smart tag is simply a placeholder for other preset data. For example, when editing a page, I could enter the smart tag {TITLE}. When the published page is displayed, this placeholder gets replaced by the page's title. It's a handy way of accessing predefined words, phrases, numbers, images or markup etc. To insert a smart tag, you enter the variable you wish to output within curly brackets and tick the 'Allow Smart Tags in this page?' box in the page options. Smart tags can also be entered when editing in source mode. Available Page Smart Tags Scope: These smart tags only output the variables for the page they're in. {PID} {PARENTID) {TITLE) {FRIENDLY_TITLE) {META_DESCRIPTION) {META_KEYWORDS) {CONTENT)* {ISPHP) {TAGS) {LAST_UPDATED) {USE_CUSTOM_HEADER) {CUSTOM_HEADER_IMAGE) {USE_CUSTOM_CSS) {CUSTOM_CSS_FILE) {USE_CUSTOM_HTML) {CUSTOM_HTML_FILE) {MENU_ITEM) {MENU_ONLY) {MENU_URL) {SHOW_TOPLINK) {SHOW_TOC) {ALLOW_SMART_TAGS} {UNLINK_BREADCRUMB) Available Site Smart Tags Scope: These are global smart tags - usable within any page. {CONFIG_SITE_TITLE} {CONFIG_SITE_EMAIL} {CONFIG_SITE_URL} {CONFIG_DEFAULT_META_DESCRIPTION} {CONFIG_DEFAULT_META_KEYWORDS} {CONFIG_CONTENT_FOLDER} {CONFIG_HOMEPAGE_ID} {CONFIG_SITE_FOOTER} {CONFIG_LOGO_POSITION} {CONFIG_PAGE_NOT_FOUND_ID} {CONFIG_CSS_FILE} {CONFIG_RSS_LOCATION} {CONFIG_MAINTENANCE_ON} {CONFIG_MAINTENANCE_MESSAGE} Caveats If you allow a page to contain smart tags and enter one that doesn't exist, the page will throw an error. When smart tags are enabled, the curly brackets become reserved and anything within them will be considered a variable. And if it's not, it breaks. Smart tags are not available within sidebars, custom HTML pages or pages that only contain raw PHP. If you wish to access variables within these pages, you must use PHP's echo or print function and use a dollar sign $ to declare the variable (note there is no dollar sign in front of smart tag variables). * - Although the smart tag exists in theory, you cannot use {CONTENT} - this would send the system into an infinite loop whereby it would parse the content tag, find the content smart tag, parse that, find it again, and so on. Extending with Custom Smart Tags To extend the number of variables available within smart tags, you can add custom ones via the administration index (Super Admins only). Smart tags created this way are accessible from any page - i.e., they're considered global. For example, if I wanted to add a smart tag called 'TELEPHONE' - I'd enter the smart tag name (telephone) and a corresponding value (e.g., 123456) and this would then be accessible from any page by simply entering {TELEPHONE}. Smart tag names must only contain letters, numbers and underscores and you must use upper case when calling them. The actual smart tag value can be anything - even HTML and images. Confused? Basically there are three types of page that Vanilla can use: Normal page - entered into the WYSIWYG editor - PHP is not allowed anywhere in these pages, smart tags are. PHP only page - can contain PHP only, no smart tag support, variables must be output using print or echo. Custom HTML page - substitute your page for an uploaded one, again no smart tags but you can echo or print page and global site variables (including what you enter into the WYSIWYG area).   http://www.vanillacms.com/?pID=35 http://www.vanillacms.com/?pID=35 Real-time search results. Vanilla's search engine utilises AJAX and MySQL's powerful FULLTEXT feature to rapidly return, in real-time, any pages that match your search query. This is extremely fast and can search through tens of thousands of pages within milliseconds. When you click on a returned result, the visited page will highlight the search terms until one of them is clicked on. Try searching for 'ajax' and clicking on a returned result. You can also highlight items in the page via a specially crafted URL: Click here to highlight the words AJAX, MySQL and FULLTEXT on this page Page highlight URLs are appended with &q=your+search+words. This method also works with Friendly URLs. Boolean Mode The Vanilla search feature also supports MySQL's boolean option. This allows the inclusion of the following search switches: "term" search for exact match - exclude term, e.g., music -classical + must contain term, e.g., musical +classical * search for term beginning with, e.g., class* would return words such as class, classroom, classic etc. Search Exclusion We've engineered the search so that orphan pages, inactive pages and their children (whether active or not) are excluded from any search results. This prevents folks from looking at pages that are hidden, outdated or not ready for publishing yet. http://www.vanillacms.com/?pID=181 http://www.vanillacms.com/?pID=181 http://www.vanillacms.com/?pID=180 http://www.vanillacms.com/?pID=180 Accessibility - Triple-A Vanilla's Front-End Accessibility Features Include: Persistent resizeable text on all pages Menu navigation supports full keyboard control Persistent Hi-Vis mode displays content in high contrast colours Vanilla CMS passes the strict Triple-A conformance guidelines set out by W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative. If you're trying to validate this site, and it fails, it's because of this somewhat contentious issue: "The text content of each h1 element should match all or part of the title content." To circumvent this, simply don't use the Heading 1 (h1) style in the main content of your pages (or make sure they 'match'). Accessibility and Keyboard Shortcuts The navigation menu and page links can be traversed using the keyboard on most modern browsers.  Furthermore, all links, both in regular and hi-vis display mode, show prominent borders and background colours to aid those with visual impairment. Keyboard Shortcuts: TAB - skip forwards through menu items/links SHIFT + TAB - skip backwards through menu items/links RIGHT ARROW - open sub menu ENTER - visit menu link (same as a mouse click)