CYBERSPACE — Mansion Productions' award winning Content Management System — MAS — is entering the beta testing phase of its version 2.0. Since its first version was released back in 2003, the product has been improved constantly, although announced as minor version number increments, gaining maturity while being the CMS of choice for several hundred customers and powering thousands of websites.
Version 2 is a true major upgrade. While fully backwards-compatible and inheriting all features and customizations from previous versions, the code has been completely re-written with security, productivity and maximum flexibility in mind. With numerous new features added, everything is wrapped in a shining brand new admin user interface.
The workspace looks more like a standard desktop application where multiple windows and dialog boxes can be displayed at any time, freely moved around, rolled up to a small title bar while the user looks at another window or minimized to the taskbar which shows all active windows. Template editing areas can be detached as separate maximizable windows with syntax highlighting and code hints and feature multiple undo capability — which can often be a lifesaver. The ability to have multiple windows with different parts of the interface open is also something that makes the everyday experience with the system easier and faster, especially when working on a big monitor.
This version introduces the completely new Background Execution Manager, which handles all CPU-, HDD- and MySQL-intensive processes like rebuilding pages, creating thumbs, creating zips and video extraction and transcoding. Not only does it makes it faster for the admin user and nicer to the server, but it also eliminates the potential security issue of having all content folders with open web-writeable 777 permissions, which is a common issue to most CMS products having to update multiple files on the server. A visual Task Manager lets the admin monitor/pause/kill the currently running process, see and rearrange the list of queued processes and check logs of finished ones.
Various improvements to the Content Attributes, Section templates and Gallery templates (tags, loops, inheritance, assignment, grouping and filtering) greatly improve productivity when using the system to create a network of similar looking sites with common templates. They also come in handy when redesigning existing sites (reducing the need to clone the content sets) and simplify the code in templates when different layouts are needed for the members area and the free tour versions.
A few other notable additions to the vast features list are:
- Built-in Video Transcoding and Frames Extraction Module;
- Preview Images Manager
- Comments, Favorites, Watermarks
- Cached Search Results, Auto-Suggest Search Box
- Dynamic, Cached Image Resize-Tool (in addition to statically built thumbnails and medium-res photos)
- Multiple Templates per Content Set/Site
- Auto-Populated Calendar of Updates
- Advanced Content Rotation Settings
- Many New Tags and Advanced Template Structures
- Built-in Support for Major CDN's and Video Streaming Technologies
More information about features is available and a full list of all current and the next upcoming features will be published at the time when MAS version 2 passes the beta testing phase and gets officially released to the market.
