Drag & Drop | Content Editing | W3C 'Real Time' Validation | Template Creation Dynamic Navigation | Multilingual Support | Workflow & Publication | Search | RSS
Proximity WebLab-CMS is the market leader for flexibility and ease of use when designing and managing your web sites site map. All web sites need a structure and are normally based on some kind of hierarchical structure, separated out into sections or categories, each with a series of pages within them. Proximity WebLab-CMS provides an easy hierarchical view of your entire site map all the time within the 'Page Manager' window, with an expanding 'tree' style menu showing exactly where your pages and categories are within your site map quickly and easily. "But what happens when I want to change this layout?" Traditionally you would need your web team to make changes to your entire web site navigation, moving pages and resetting the internal links from page to page to make what is primarily a minor change a potential mammoth task. What if you could just 'drag' your new pages from one area to another, directly in your site map ... ? ... well you can with Proximity WebLab-CMS! Our demonstration movie shows you just how simple the process is and you can freely move single pages or entire sections of your web site simply within the WebLab 'Page Editor' view, all with your mouse, all with a simple 'drag & drop' operation. WebLab-CMS handles the hard work, managing your sites navigation structure, internal links and dynamic code so all you need to do is restructure and then publish. See 'Drag n Drop' in action
In any Content Management System, the way you edit and manage your pages is key to the sites and products success. Proximity WebLab-CMS provides a market leading, fully compliant XHTML WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor for you to build your web site pages content. If you can use a word processor, you can use our editor! Manage text and layout simply on screen, in realtime, directly in your page layout. Adding images, flash animations, movies, documents is as simple as clicking the relevant icon in the editor; WebLab-CMS provides access directly to your resource galleries allowing you to browse and select the resource you want to add to your page and to make life easier, you can even upload additional resources to your resource gallery directly in the text editor! But thats just scratching the surface on what else you can do ....
What's more, Proximity WebLab-CMS remembers everything you do, change or create, allowing a full historical rollback of individual placeholders should you need to. See WYSIWYG Content Editing in action
Web accessibility and all that surrounds it is very important in todays world. Providing accessible content and meeting the Web Accessibility Initiatives (WAI) guidelines set out for todays web sites is now becoming increasingly more important, to the point that any web site providing a service for others to use must meet the WAI guidelines to conform with the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) and the law in the UK. This is also true of other nations, like Section 508 in the US. To begin meeting these guidelines you need to be sure the underlaying code that produces your web site, (the HTML) is in line with todays standards, making your site initially accessible across a range of browsers and platforms. Proximity WebLab-CMS fully understands and commits to the regulations, guidelines and standards provided by these bodies and provides a full W3C XHTML validation tool within their WYSIWYG editor. Directly from the editor in both the 'Template Manager' and the 'Content Editor', you can now validate your code directly with the W3C online validators, in real time, getting instant feedback on your code structure and tips on what to fix before you publish it to the web.
Where Proximity WebLab-CMS differs greatly from other Content Management Systems is in its global flexibility; as with every function we have created in the software, keeping the creativity and flexibility with the site owner has always been key.
Using the freedom of the WebLab 'Lingo' language, you as the designer simply add encoded tags to your templates (all available via a simple drop down list directly in the template editor) to the areas of your template you want WebLab to do something for you ...
Probably 'the' most important part of your web site - the navigation control. " ... we wanted to offer as much flexibility in the product as possible when it came to navigation, so we provide three different types of navigation control, with over 20 different themes per navigation, straight out of the box." Proximity WebLab-CMS allows you to add complex hierarchical or DHTML navigation controls to your web site with just a few clicks. Everything is configured in a single place when you design your site, in the 'Navigation Manager' and it's from here you can select your navigation type and theme, previewing how the navigation looks before committing it to your site. But of course, you can always change the navigation at anytime in your sites lifetime. Proximity WebLab-CMS handles all the code in the background to render your navigation at runtime, creating all the page links as required and applying the themes, scripts and styles as required without you doing a thing. Tabbed Navigation A classic menu style that has been used successfully on several major web sites over the years. DHTML Navigation Animated drop down menus, with no limit to navigation depth are available in this control. The navigation automatically handle 'n Tier' levels of navigation, pushing the options out vertically and horizontally as you explore the navigation structure. Tree Navigation A fully expandable and collapsible hierarchical navigation tree, this control provided complete flexibility over 'n Tier' levels of navigation, all with the option to be fully exposed as required. Panel Navigation Based on the familiar MS Outlook and other desktop application menu's, Panel navigation offers a clear and segregated view of your sites navigation. As with other navigation controls, there are no limits to the levels you can extend this control
Multilingual support comes as standard with all versions of Proximity WebLab-CMS with the exception of the 'Home' edition. Currently, the software ships with English (UK & US), French, German, Chinese, Russian and Korean with full editor spell checking being available in English, French and German at this time, and available while you build your web site. When you first create a new site in WebLab-CMS, you will be asked to select a default language. This is the parent language for the entire web site and is used as the basis for additional languages you may want to add. However, unlike a lot of other Content Management Systems, WebLab-CMS allows totally independent site maps for each different language, providing complete freedom in flexibility in how you design a web site from language to language. ".. when we built the language options into WebLab, we considered the pros and cons of whether the site should have a global navigation or allow separate options. Our experience showed us that how a site may look for UK visitors for example may not be what it's alternative Japanese or Chinese market may want their site to look like. We decided on the flexible option, allowing WebLab to use different templates as well as different navigational site maps from language to language!"
Content and Publication Workflow are found in all versions of Proximity WebLab-CMS with the exception of WebLab-CMS 'Lite' The workflow process offers a powerful approach to content approval from initial draft through to final page publication onto your web site. Proximity WebLab-CMS provides a role based permission system which you can assign to all your users in WebLab-CMS. Depending on the role you give them, determines what permissions they have to do certain tasks within WebLab-CMS and the web site itself.. For a page to be published onto your web site, it must pass through specific steps before being visible on the live site. For each step in the process, the submitting user is able to select one or more users assigned with the next workflow step role permission, to be notified they are submitting a page to them. Once submitted, the page status is updated and the originating user can no longer promote that page any further in the workflow. Proximity WebLab-CMS notifies the next workflow users that they have a page awaiting their attention, both by email, as an alert when that user logs into WebLab-CMS and also in the users individual 'Approval Manager' screen. From here, the receiving user can either approve the page (after editing it if required) and submit it on to the next level of workflow, or decline the page and send it back to the originating user. Accompanied with all submissions and declines is the option to add notes and comments to the specific page to assist in the workflow process. In addition, users with 'publish' privilages can simply push a single page from staging to the live website while in 'Preview' mode, offering a fast, effective way to update single pages within your website without the need for entire site publication or workflow approval. See 'Push Publish' in action
As you would expect, Proximity WebLab-CMS offers full content search capabilities straight out of the box. Using just a couple of lines of 'WebLab Lingo', you can add a full search engine to your web site with full results filtering on language, publication date and XOR searching. " ... just to make it that bit easier, WebLab highlights each matched keyword or phrase in the result pages. 'A-la'Google!" The WebLab-CMS search makes use of individual page meta data where possible, using the 'Meta Description' tag as a summary text within search page results, but where thats not found, WebLab outputs a generic page summary to keep your results pages dynamic. And of course, adding search to all of you pages is just as simple. Add the 'lingo', tell WebLab-CMS which page holds your search results control and off you go ... quick search facilities from every page of your site!
RSS or Really Simple Syndication is becoming more popular over the internet now than ever. Proximity WebLab-CMS fully support RSS, allowing you to pull content from external web sites directly onto your own (as we have done in the BBC example), or by exposing specific areas of your web site to be available to others as direct XML (RSS) content. Imagine, publishing a page to your web site with all your latest news in it and then exposing that as an RSS feed. Your clients could simply add this RSS link to their local RSS reader and your web site content is instantly streaming to their desktop! And as RSS has become more popular, a lot of the major browsers and email clients (Internet Explorer, Mozilla FireFox and Microsoft Outlook) all have the capabilities built in directly, making receiving your content simple. The powerful RSS Editor built into Proximity WebLab-CMS lets you configure infinite RSS feeds to your site.