Exware is preparing to release a major overhaul of our software platform, V4. The V4 platform is built on an all-new Content Management technology that offers significant benefits to those who upgrade. This document gives an overview of the features and benefits of V4. It is also available as a PDF download.
V4 is significantly faster. It achieves this speed boost in a few ways:
V4 has more security features for your own users. There are now 10 access levels, with four levels of regular user, and 4 levels of executive (plus public, and one unrestricted access level). That allows you to define more privileged types of user (for example, committee chairs or board members), and less privileged types of executive (for example, moderators or reviewers). It also lets you be much more specific about access permissions (eg. level 2 and up rather than just "members only"), as well as making it easier to distinguish between valid members, expired members, and registered guests.
V4 also has groups, which allows you to grant permissions to a particular group (for example, the board of directors), and then add/remove people from that group, without having to tinker with their individual permissions.
V4 lets you control access to specific pages or other items in the system, not just whole sections. V4 also lets you revoke access to parts of your site. (For example, a certain administrator could edit the entire site except for a certain page.)
V4 gives you more control over which parts of the page are member-only, and which parts are public, rather than simply blocking everything from view for under-privileged visitors.
Because V4 relies more on static and client-side content, it is less vulnerable to DOS attacks, bad robots, database slowdowns, and other vulnerabilities that can impact your website's availability.
V4 overhauls the user interface to all tools and applications. It makes use of the latest web UI frameworks, including HTML5, Bootstrap, JQuery, and Font Awesome. This makes admin interfaces more responsive and accessible. (And pretty!) There are fewer popup windows, and it's easier to keep track of your open plugins.
V4 implements the same types of management tools and user interfaces across all of your plugins and various types of content and data. This simplifies the learning process and makes it much easier to jump around to different parts of your website without needing special training. Blogs, Calendars, Documents, and Membership Profiles are no longer markedly different tools each with their own specialized user interfaces. In V4 they all utilize the same basic tools for editing, configuration, translation, workflow, security, and other functions.
The V4 content management tools are designed to be extensible. This makes it much more efficient to grow and customize the system, and allows those customizations to automatically incorporate and benefit from all of the features mentioned above.
V4 uses friendly URLs that are more descriptive of the topic and context of the item you are viewing. The .html suffix is used in some places, but is not used for pages, which further simplifies the most commonly used URLs on your site. For example: http://foo.com/services/web_design instead of http://foo.com/web_design.html.
Blogs and Calendars incorporate dates into their URLs, for example: http://foo.com/calendar/2016/12/AGM.html.
You can incorporate remote 3rd party URLs into your menus and other site content. You can also link to PDF documents and other files in your menus.
Simple static URLs work even for dynamic pages. For example, if a page is dynamic and is generated by the dynamic URL http://foo.com/cgi/ex.cgi/page/foo, you can still reach the page using the simple static URL http://foo.com/foo.
Blogs, calendars, catalogs, and many other things automatically set themselves up as pages. No need to create special holder pages, and insert plugins. There is much less need for service pages.
Sitemap and submenu structure is reflected in URLs, for example: http://foo.com/services/web_design.
Pages keep their images and other files cleanly separated so they don't clobber each other. For instance, if two pages both have a banner.jpg file, they won't overwrite each other.
Any object (for example, a photo or a library) can be formatted like a page, simply by using the page URL, eg. http://foo.com/ex.cgi/page/library/photo
V4 allows you to maintain numerous views of the same content. This is especially useful in a time of responsive design for mobile devices and high-resolution design for retina devices, which all require vastly different resolutions for optimal results. V4 allows you to maintain images in multiple sizes and resolutions, including thumbnail, small, regular, and large, so that you can design better for multiple types of viewing devices.
V4 makes a distinction between libraries and albums. A library contains images that you intend to use individually by inserting them into pages. An album contains a collection of images that you intend to display as a group using an image viewing app. This makes it easier to implement galleries and slideshows.
Files are no longer encoded in the database, which improves the speed of unpublished and member-only files.
Oversized documents can be uploaded and will still be tracked by the revision control system.
Web forms can accept file uploads.
V4 allows for much more customization in the layout of specific types of content. You not only have the ability to template whole pages, but you can also template sub-elements of the page. For example, you can change the markup structure of articles or events if you do not like the default.
Multilingual translation features are now available on a much broader range of content types, including blog articles, events, products, and others.
You can maintain multiple distinct keyword indexes, and tag any type of content with them, including events, products, member profiles, and others.
You can control whether or not content should be indexed by site search, and by Google or other robot-driven search engines.
Site search is available in administrator control panels. The results link to administration screens, rather than public pages.
V4 gives you more tools to manage the state of your content for better workflow. For example:
The system also has a like/unlike feature that can be used to build an auto-moderation system.
Any content can be archived. Archived content continues to be reachable from public URLs, but it has reduced functionality in other ways:
You can define both automatic and manual tasks for website maintenance. Automatic tasks are scheduled to happen at certain times, and can recur hourly, daily, or weekly. Manual tasks are items that are placed on your system's to-do list. Reminders are emailed out on their due dates, and you can manually review your to-do list and mark tasks as done.
Content can be set to publish dynamically, statically, or on hourly, daily, or weekly publish intervals. Content can decide for itself what setting is most appropriate. Normally there is no need to fuss with those settings.
You can schedule publication at certain dates and times, or put things into a publish queue to be taken live automatically.
Content will automatically publish and unpublish itself when end-users do things that change the site (such as post to forums).
Web forms have both been simplified and extended with new features.
Simplifications include drag-and-drop question ordering, and the elimination of question libraries. Every form now doubles as its own question library. To re-use questions, simply copy them from any other form.
New features include numerous new question types, including file uploads, numbers, range sliders, dates, times, and URLs. You can also specify a short-form of the question that will be used in reporting. Your can specify custom layouts for individual questions, as well as whole forms.
Simply by adding prices to a form, you can turn it into an e-commerce enabled order form. Filling out the form automatically adds an item to your shopping cart.
Users can purchase and manage multiple memberships at once.
Membership events (such as expiry, renewal, change of type) can be scheduled and queued.
Group management allows for bulk permissions management, such as for committees, boards, and other purposes.
Event registrations have been simplified, greatly reducing the number of fees that need to be managed in larger events.
All V4 registrations follow a ticket reservation model. When the user purchases a ticket, it is reserved for them temporarily. Once payment is confirmed, the ticket sale is completed, but if the ticket purchase fails, the ticket is released back into the inventory. Registration limits are simply a matter of creating the necessary number of tickets to start with; once the inventory is gone, there is nothing left to sell. There is no chance of overselling the last spots if multiple people attempt to register at the same time. Expanding event capacity is simply a matter of adding new tickets to the inventory.
This model of ticket sales allows for selling predefined seats or placements.
Printable tickets include QR codes that can encode registrant information or validation URLs.
V4 has an all-new administration interface for product catalogs to simplify your online store management.
A general-purpose pricing service allows you to define pricing rules for anything that you sell, including member pricing, early and late prices, and sales.
Shopping carts have several usability improvements, including:
V4 has a simple but flexible system for categorizing sales using GL codes. It automatically defines its own GL codes to categorize sales to a good level of detail. (For example, all event sales in one particular event fee, or all membership renewals in one particular membership category.) If you have preferred GL codes in your own accounting system, you can map these to your own GL codes. GL codes make it very easy to create categorized financial reports, grouped by related sales.