Geek Post – Our CMS!

We are really chuffed with our SMART CMS.  We designed the system just over 3 years ago, it took about 6 months of in-house development to bring to market and now we have over 150 websites using it. Some are large with over 100 pages and some are tiny 5 pagers.

The system was designed by myself.  In a previous life I was a Development Manager for Thomson Reuters, managing a small development team and working closely with other managers.  I have a degree in Computing (2:1) followed by 10 years or so real life development and managerial experience in software.

During my time at Thomson Reuters I was in charge of a number of (.net, ASP, AJAX) applications that streamed real-time data from the stock market on to secure website apps that would allow traders to drill down and derive meaningful stats/data/chart.  It had to be reliable, quick, light and very user friendly.

When I started on the design of SMART I took my knowledge of large applications and really thought about how we would need SMART to work in the future. We wrote SMART from scratch in PHP/MySQL and AJAX.  I’d not used PHP before but realised that it was the way forwards.  I wanted the websites that SMART created to be light using plain XHTML/CSS.  I didn’t want to have 150 versions of my CMS physically deployed with the clients website (what a nightmare for updates!).  It was important to be able to offer the CMS to clients as an add-on, if they did not want it then I wanted the websites they had purchased to be as good as any written by hand and totally portable on their own servers.

So how did we do it?  (GEEKS ONLY PLEASE!)

1. Well we have a central online database storing all client page data.  Clients can login to SMART and update their data at anytime.  Websites can be previewed or made live.  What this effectively does is to recreate the website from scratch and send it via FTP over to the satellite and dependant website.  It’s a bit like cloud computing except i’d not heard of it at that time!
2. We have developed a number of data and page types and a huge array of XHTML templates. We can update the templates and know that when a client presses make live next that they might not notice that their website now includes a new tag which we have discovered is good for Google – it is magic.   Effectively their source code will always be updated to be compliant and work with newer browsers, and their design will look the same as ever. 
3. The templates live in plain text files on our server with placeholder tags for database driven or data functions.  Our website writer code zips through the DB and then converts these plain text files into valid XHTML files.
4. The websites themselves are purely designed in CSS.  That is to say under the hood the raw XHTML is basically the same.  All images, CSS, XHTML and any JavaScript (we try not to use any) etc all live on the clients own hosting.  So if they cancel their SMART license they still have a valid website.
5. We can essentially change or update the CMS in anyway we like and have total control over it – if a client wants a calendar app on their front page – they got it!
6. We also had to consider the development strategy – we had three developers, UI (ME!), backend (Ria) and “website writer” (Chris).  All these elements had to talk to each other so had to be written in units.  We also needed to consider the order in which we worked so that we would have something to show clients and could get some working sites up and running before certain features were available.

The benefits to our clients are

1. Fast loading websites which are easy to host
2. Website code that does not go out of date
3. Flexibility in page layouts and content types
4. No fear of being tied in or loosing their website if they move suppliers
5. Search engine friendly websites
6. Our CMS can grow with them
7. SMART is being updated with new features all the time  (this week we added an RSS feed and a new easy method to allow for multiple options with Romancart)

SMART was developed to be user friendly and most of all search engine friendly and personally I think we ticked all the boxes!??  I still pinch myself when I think of how great this has been for our business.

So – if you read this far then you are probably a developer, if you left after the first paragraph – then that’s cool this blog was not really written for you. If you are a developer or designer and are looking for a CMS to offer to your clients then perhaps you would like to get in touch. SMART is well tested and we’ve sold a few licenses already!

CMS | 23.11.2009 23:23 | No Comments