ExSite Visual Tour

The Web Top

The ExSite Webtop is the basis of your website administration system. It contains icons to launch the administrator back-ends of each of your web applications.

  1. The Website Editor gives you a powerful and easy to use tool to manage any number of sites, pages, templates, and all of your content. The Database Manager allows you to inspect, browse, edit, and add new data into your database. Various back-end database engines are supported.

  2. Additional web applications can easily be installed or built to the ExSite Dynamic Content API. Every application serves as a source of dynamic content that can be inserted into pages as required. Those applications that have an administrator interface will appear on the webtop, as seen here. Simply click on the appropriate icons to launch the admin tool for each application.

  3. Administration screens all have the ExSite top bar, with buttons for returning to the web-top, accessing help, and logging out.

Web Sites

Inside the Website Editor, you can inspect your sites and view all pages and templates.

  1. Each page, template, and content library is represented with an icon. Simply click on the icon to open it up.

  2. general site configuration information (such as how and where it is published, the public URL, and so on) is shown on the left. These may be reconfigured at any time.

  3. The menu bar at the top of the Content Manager window gives you various options for configuring, navigating, previewing, and publishing your sites and pages.

Administrator's Page Preview

When previewing your page in Administrator Mode, ExSite inserts extra tools into the page to allow you to more easily manage it.

  1. A menubar at the top of the page includes a variety of options for operating on the page or site as a whole, jumping to site maps, or returning to the back-end administration screens.

  2. Editable content is highlighted with a dashed red line. The small buttons give you options to update or manage the content. These do not appear in public views of the page, of course. Content that you are not allowed to edit (because of permission levels, or because it belongs to the template and not this particular page) is not editable - such as the page masthead at the top of this example. This prevents users from accidentally or intentionally tampering with page elements that do not belong to them. A single page may have multiple editable regions, which are managed separately.

Online Content Editor

When updating content, you are taken to the WYSIWYG editor, which runs directly in your browser, and requires no special plug-ins. The editor is compatible with Windows IE, Netscape 7.1, Mozilla 1.4, and Firefox browsers. That means it will run on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers.

  1. You can type directly into the editor here. The editor also accepts content that has been cut-and-pasted from other pages or documents. The editor displays the content as it has been marked up by HTML, including inlined images.

  2. The editor toolbar gives you a selection of standard editor tools, including undo/redo, bold, italicize, underline, text color, background color, justification, bulleted and numbered lists, indentation, and insertion of tables, hyperlinks, and images. There are also tools on the bottom status bar (not visible) for selecting fonts, and text style (body, heading, etc.).

  3. The editor defaults to the WYSIWYG mode when updating HTML, but it has other modes, such as file upload (for images), plain text mode (for editing HTML tags directly), and others.

  4. Note that your position within the content hierarchy is always shown at the top of the content management screens. You can quickly jump to other parts of the hierarchy simply by clicking on this bar.

Version Management

ExSite has version management, so your old content is not lost when you make updates. This makes it easy to roll back to earlier versions if there are any problems.

  1. Each version is displayed, from most recent to oldest. Each version has a timestamp and a comment indicating the change that was made from the previous version.

Version control is also the basis of advanced workflow systems, in which multiple site managers can be updating content, but each content update must be approved by senior managers before going "live". Workflow tools are in development at this time. ExSite presently supports multiple site administrators, multiple levels of access, and multiple site manager types (editors, designers, and administrators).

Web Application Control Panels

Each web application on the site (see first screenshot, at top) can have its own control panel. The above screenshots are of the control panels for the base Content Management System, but every web app can implement its own control panel interface. Shown here is an example control panel from the Database Manager.

  1. When inspecting individual records, the record data is displayed in a simple tabular form. Data is hyperlinked, if it refers to email addresses, URLs, or other referenced records.

  2. Small icons indicate the operations you are allowed to perform on the displayed record, such as edit, copy, and delete.

  3. Related records are summarized in tables following the main record. You also have options to visit and/or operate on these records, as well as add new records to the list.

Because the Database Manager is a fairly low-level interface to your data, it can make a useful control panel for any database-driven web application. It is easy to build a control panel that simply cross-links to the Database Manager tools.