Lisk Content Management System

«Lisk CMS» is a comprehensive user friendly Content Management System developed by Createch Group. The first version was launched in October 2001 and now we present Lisk CMS v.4.3 which incorporates five years of extensive experience of our company in providing the top level content management solutions.

Lisk CMS meets all requirements of today’s demanding market, among which are user friendliness, the use of the latest web technologies, search engines friendliness, ability to seamlessly integrate with third party software, high security, support and more.

All content is editable The main purpose of any Content Management System is to provide the ability of editing content. However a lot of CMS solutions do not allow managing indeed everything or do it not in the best way.

To provide our customers with the ability to manage really all website content and to do this in the most user friendly and effective form, Lisk CMS incorporates 3 approaches to content management.

Editing content using Site Structure module

The main website content is usually editable via Site Structure module of the Control Panel, for example About Company section pages. With the help of Site Structure you can manage the content of each page using HTML Editor as well as create new pages and sections.

Managing structured data

Using HTML Editor it is easy to edit the content of a simple page, such as About Us, however if you need to manage hundreds of products in products catalogue or news section the use of HTML editor will take too much time and effort. To make this process easy and convenient Lisk CMS is powered with a number of built-in modules for managing structured data (tree, list, cross list, etc.). You can learn more about this concept in “Working with structured data” article.

Editing block-type content

There is a lot of content on your website that does not belong to a particular page (i.e. site copyright) or is being a part of site functionality (i.e. site registration confirmation). For managing such content while working with Lisk CMS you will never be referred to site templates, it will be available for editing in a separate section of the Control Panel.

Lisk Modules

Lisk CMS includes many ready-to-go website modules that are fully integrated into the CMS and offer powerful and flexible solutions for managing corresponding areas of the website.

Among the modules are such as: Newsletter Feedback forms News Media Gallery Downloads Products Catalogue Site Structure Poll Metatags manager Links Directory Visits Statistics Action Statistics Guest book FAQ Events Lisk Cache

Each Lisk CMS edition comes with a predefined set of modules which may be needed for the purposes of a certain type of website; however upon request we can provide a custom Lisk CMS edition or just add the required modules to the standard edition set.

Also, following our company policy, we constantly perfect existing and develop new modules to meet the needs of our customers.

Lisk CMS is a perfect solution for a wide range of web sites such as corporate, e-commerce, community and intranet/extranet systems. However, due to the capabilities of Lisk CMS Architecture and Lisk Framework, it should not be considered just an out-of-the-box solution. Lisk CMS allows to consider all aspects and requirements of the project and at the final stage to provide a custom made solution that ideally suits customer’s needs and business objectives.

In this section you will find information on the general features and advantages of Lisk CMS, however we strongly recommend trying Lisk CMS in action by creating an online demo site to learn about all its features and capabilities on your own.

Built-in editors HTML WYSIWYG Editor

To help you work with pages content, Lisk CMS is powered with a powerful and easy-to-master web-based HTML Editor that incorporates all the major text-processing operations which you may ever need, including inserting tables and images, using various fonts of different sizes and colors and creating hyper references. It is very similar to working with standard text-processing software, so if you know the basics of Microsoft Word you will not encounter any problems working with our HTML editor.

Image Editor

Working with images is very important and quite often poses a problem for site administrators. To help you with this, Lisk CMS includes Image Editor. It is web a based java application that allows you to do all the editing you may need before publishing images on the site. Resizing, cropping, image rotating, flipping, adjusting brightness, contrast and many other necessary operations are available.

Functionality and User friendliness The possibility to manage the website and its content in the most flexible, convenient and time-saving way - this is Lisk CMS credo. We never spare time and effort to create the best possible solutions.

Do you need to set a date? - Use a handy drop-down calendar. Do you need to add many files? - Upload them through FTP and then just select the one you need with the web-based FTP browser. Would you like to change the email notification content? - Use the Email Template module. The list goes on, once you test and see the demo for yourself, you will discover many other useful and necessary features.

Your time and comfort while working with Lisk CMS have always been our primary objectives and criteria.

Search Engines Friendly Web sites in today's competitive business market that are not optimized for search don't have much of a chance of being found by potential customers; and that goes for non-business sites as well. That is why we put much effort to make Lisk CMS Search Engines friendly.

Search engines friendly URLs

With Lisk CMS you will never meet an URL like "http://yourwebsite.com/index.php?pageid=3&sort= ascending&language=english&rvisitor=y"

All pages addresses are search engines friendly. By default they look like a folder structure, i.e. "www.yourwebsite.com/company/about/" However site administrator can change it to "www.yourwebsite.com/about.htm" if it is needed for any reason - for example, for setting up Lisk CMS on existing web site to save current pages names.

Meta-Data Management

For some websites that grow very fast the ability to categorize data and ensure that users and search engines can find relevant information is now more important than ever. In addition, many government organizations require mandatory standards based meta-data management for web pages to be met. To ensure that meta-data structures (such as the Dublin Core) can be enforced on any page of a web site we have developed the Metatags Manager module. This module provides the ability to manage site meta information in the most convenient and effective way.

To learn more about Metatags Manager please visit Lisk CMS > Modules > Metatags Manager section.

Links Directory

Additionally, we have developed Links Directory module that provides all necessary functionality and a lot of very useful features for organizing site links directory, that is required for search engines optimization and site promotion.

To learn more about Links Directory module please visit Lisk CMS > Modules > Links Directory section.

Working with structured data It is easy to fill your site with content and update the content using Lisk CMS HTML editor. However, managing large quantity of data may become a problem. Sometimes you may find it difficult to make sense out of hundreds of news entries, or to arrange all your employees' profiles as you like. You may - somewhere else, but not with Lisk CMS. We have developed convenient and flexible modules that will eliminate problems while working with long lists of entries or tree-like catalogues and others.

For the past years, we have studied our customers' needs and their experience with our CMS; we have added many features that can be useful to our clients during content management and save their time.

Protected & Secure Site protection and security are very important problems and their solving should not be only a development issue but rather a well-elaborated question on architecture level. While developing Lisk CMS a lot of attention has been paid to such security aspects as:

SQL Injection

SQL Injection is one of the most common weak spots of web applications. To solve this problem we have developed anti SQL Injection module that has been realized on a database layer of the architecture to prevent any chance of SQL injection.

Authorization protection

The site authorization is often an object of hacker attention. To ensure that Lisk Authorization is secured we paid much attention to this issue. In Lisk CMS the confidential information is never stored in sessions or cookies to prevent the possibility of data interception and usage by unauthorized parties.

File access level

In Lisk CMS file access is granted on the level of operation system to prevent unauthorized access. Also, access to the files that should not be executed or read directly (i.e. templates, engine, site files) is forbidden.

Multilevel, role play administration

Website content can be managed by several people. Providing them with access to managing of the whole site could be a considerable risk. To solve this problem Lisk CMS has a multilevel, role play site administration architecture which allows multiple administrators to manage only the areas assigned to them by the main administrator.

Flexibility & Integration Flexibility & Integration are Lisk properties which our developers are proud of the most. Lisk CMS credo is to never adjust the customer's needs to CMS abilities but to be able to adjust CMS to the requirements of any project.

Lisk originated from more than 5 years experience in development of more than 100 custom web projects. Based on this experience we have identified the most common functionality requests and the most effective and user friendly solutions which did not limit the expandability of the developed applications.

Lisk CMS architecture allows implementing any specific functionally which can be developed and integrated with Lisk by any developer. Having an option of developing based on Lisk Framework API or following his own programming approach, the developer can implement any required functionality.

Expand & Restructure Being a significant part of your business, your website should be expandable and adaptable to business and market demands. That is why Lisk CMS has a built-in Site Structure module which is probably the main tool for managing website content and structure.

Site Structure module allows reorganizing your website structure, manage existing content, add new pages and sections, install new modules, manage page templates, set access levels and more.

Working with Lisk CMS Site Structure module you can be sure that your website is ready to meet market challenges and rising requirements; you can quickly and conveniently update the website or adapt it to the changing business environment.

Organizing Site Files The ability to effectively organize site files is an important part of successful corporate website. Lisk CMS provides fully integrated and convenient tool for this purpose. Using Site Files section you will be able to store and organize all types of files (images, documents, media etc.) used on your website in one place. You will be able to manage them either through FTP or web interface. Available actions include preview, organize in folders, add/edit/delete.

While working with Lisk CMS (for example with the HTML editor or adding an item that contains an image field) you can directly use all files from Site Files.

Site Files consists of 5 areas to sort your files by type: Images Here, the images and photos that you use on the website are stored. Also, you can edit the images using Image Editor from here. Documents This section stores all kinds of documents such as MS Word, Excel, PDF, TXT documents etc. Media Contains all kinds of media files such as .avi, .mpeg, .mp3, .wav, .mov, etc. Flash Should be used for storing and organizing macromedia flash presentations and movies. Files For storing all kind of files, which do not fall under either of the above described categories.

Help & Support Help Center

If at any moment you have a problem or a question regarding Lisk CMS features, our Help Center that covers all aspects of working with Lisk CMS is always ready to help you. It consists of 3 areas: General help - describing the basics of Lisk CMS operation, Modules section that provides help on managing Lisk modules, and Tutorials section with step by step tutorials.

Support

Our support center is always ready to help you. If a question which is not covered by our Help Center arises you can be sure that you will receive support in a timely and friendly manner.

Lifetime warranty

Lisk CMS has an inherent lifetime bug fixing and security patch warranty.

Multilevel Administration Lisk CMS has a powerful roles-based permissions architecture enabling inherited permissions to be applied to any area of Control Panel. It is based on user-groups authorization model, where any user is a part of his group and Administrator gives access to different areas of Control Panel to a certain group. This way if you want one of your staff to update site news and events calendar only, you can grant access to News & Events sections only to Editors Group. The “Administrators” group is a system group, with full access rights to the control Panel.

Also the Control Panel indicates the logged in online administrators, and tracks user logins and their IP addresses.

Backup & Restore Being an important part of your business, your web site and its data are very important and there should not be even a chance that they might be lost or damaged by mistake or due to server corruption. This is why we have developed our own Backup System. It will allow you to create website backups and restore the data in emergency situations, or if your site has been damaged.

Lisk Backup System allows creating backup files, with several options for data parts to be backed up. Among them are site Database structure and data, site files and source codes, and site dynamic file content such as images, files, and documents.

The backup archives can be moved to a backup server or downloaded to your local machine. Also, backup process can be automated by setting up a cron/scheduled job, which will automatically backup the site and its data on a regular basis.

With Lisk Backup System you can be sure that in any unfortunate event occurring on your website/server you will never lose any data.

Technical Advantages Multi-Server Website Publication

For large, enterprise level websites with very big number of visitors the only solution is a multi-server site publication. Lisk CMS supports publication of the website to multiple servers. Also, its architecture allows setting up hardware configuration the way where http, database and file servers are installed on different machines under the local network.

Multi Platform support

Since Lisk CMS is written in PHP it can be run both on Windows and Unix based web servers. As an HTTP server, Apache or Zeus can be used. Work with database, implemented using the abstract layer, allows working with either MySQL, MsSQL or Oracle databases.

Low Server Load

With a big number of website visitors server load can become a problem. For such situations, we have developed Lisk Cache module. This module creates HTML cache pages and this allows to render server load to the minimum.

Statistics Solutions Visits Statistics

Your website visits statistics is the most important information that will allow you to learn about your site performance, its audience, their interests, preferences and needs. This information helps you to improve your website work, choose an effective promotion strategy and much more. To gather and process this information we have developed Lisk Visits Statistics module. With the help of this module you can see the number of visitors, time they spent on the site, the number of website visits, visitor’s details such as browser, screen resolution, IP, clickstream. You can see where they come to your web site from, what pages are the most popular, etc.

To learn more about Visits Statistics please visit Lisk CMS > Modules > Visits Statistics section.

Action Statistics

Action Statistics is a unique Lisk CMS module designed to give you the ability to receive statistical information about any actions that users perform on the website. Being adapted to the needs of your website, the module allows you to keep track of any actions performed by a user that can be interesting to monitor. For example, Action Statistics can be indispensable for E-commerce websites, where you might need to monitor such actions as putting an item into the cart, viewing item details, actually purchasing an item, etc.

You can browse this statistics for any time range or create a report using Report Generator tool. Action statistics gives you accurate answers to the questions you may have about your website performance.

Comments? Questions? Email Here

© HowtoAdvice.com

How to Advice .com