About ExSite WebWare

The web has changed. It used to be a place for browsing simple HTML documents, but increasingly it is being used as a means of delivering Internet Applications. Web sites that were once simple collections of "flat files" are increasingly bring replaced by or augmented with complicated software systems.

It can be tricky to mix together your files and software applications so that they play nicely together. If you are not careful, you can overwrite your files accidentally, or break your applications. On your personal computer, you have an operating system like Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux, which helps to keep everything in order. As web sites are increasingly used to host multiple types of web applications, mixed with numerous forms of content, it is becoming more essential to use a web site operating system to integrate them all together smoothly. That is what ExSite Webware does for you.

ExSite Webware manages your applications, content, users, databases, input and output, and security. It does this in a way that allows any number of domains, sites, applications, databases, and users to share the same system without getting in each others' way.

It may help to think of ExSite as a Content Management System (CMS), as it includes many CMS tools and plug-ins. However, the CMS tools are just web applications like any other. In fact, there are numerous different CMS applications you can install into ExSite, so there is no one single "CMS" interface in ExSite. There are simplified CMS applications for casual users, and advanced ones for professionals, and various specialized ones for dealing with specific types of content (such as photos). You can also install other web applications for doing things other than content management. (For example, report generation, e-commerce transactions, e-mail accounts, membership management, and so on.)

ExSite Webware is LAMP-compatible, meaning it runs on industry-standard Linux-Apache-MySQL-Perl web servers. It has also been used on OS X and Unix servers. It has even been reported to run under Windows IIS (although we don't recommend that). It supports all standard web technologies. ExSite is dual-licensed; a fully supported commercial version can be licensed from Exware Solutions, while FOSS fans can download a GPL version to play with.

ExSite uses an extensible plug-in architecture, so it is flexible enough to be used on a wide variety of web sites, and is easily grown to incorporate new features and services. Because it is built on standard open web technologies, it is compatible with a variety of database and high-performance solutions. And its powerful templating and layout system allow you to go wild with your designs, and place elements where you want them, not where the CMS tells you to put them.

About this Support Site

This web site, support.exsitewebware.com, is built upon a completely generic, "out-of-the-box" version of ExSite Webware. It has no special customizations, other than a few non-default configuration settings and its own graphic design templates and stylesheets. The public side of the site makes significant use of the following plug-in modules:

Member module - for managing login accounts
Zine module - article management for forums, blogs, and documentation articles
Documents - for presentation and archiving of downloads
Search - generic site search, with Zine integration
SimpleMenu - automatic menu and site map generation