Saturday, December 17, 2005
Features
BananaPanel has many cutting-edge features not available in other CMS platforms. Here are a few of the important ones.
Full Web Service Implementation
BananaPanel was designed from the ground up as a web services-based application. What this means is that you can host the CMS and RPC server on your own servers, and your clients can place their website on their servers, and they can still connect to your server to pull down content, place orders via the online store, submit forms, etc. As you roll out new features to your BananaPanel CMS, these are available to all of your clients without the need to maintain separate versions of the CMS on their servers.
There is a simple and easy-to-add-on-to framework for adding functionality to the server, with all calls contained in a single php file.
Since the BananaPanel API uses XML-RPC for external communication, your clients can have their website coded in any language that has an XML-RPC client library. See XML-RPC.org for a list of these implementations.
Full-Featured Shopping Cart
BananaPanel has a very advanced shopping cart, with product type templates to add custom fields, options available at checkout (like shirt size and color), multiple product images, dynamically generated and hierarchical product categories, and other powerful features. It also has a basic credit card acceptance system and can be integrated (with some work) with third-party credit card processor systems.
Several Types of Dynamic Content
BananaPanel features 3 basic types of dynamic content: simple HTML blocks, "articles," and "events." The first category lets you specify a particular named block of content as editable, and your customers can update it in the CMS. The second is very dynamic; it can be used for articles, press releases, "best seller" lists,... anything really. You can turn fields on and off per article type, and tweak it to fit virtually any content scenario. "Events" are much like "articles," but they are presented as caledar events within the CMS.
Dynamically Created Forms
BananaPanel solves the "form problem" often faced by web developers. You simply create a table to hold the client's form data, then fill out the "go_forms" and "go_formfields" tables with the appropriate data, and give their user accounts access to the form un go_userforms." It can even handle select boxes and files. From then on you only need one function call to the server to create your form (complete with CSS formatting) and to place one file (FormBroker.php, available in the "demo.zip" file) on their server.
BananaPanel will add their form to their CMS pages and let them read all the data coming in, and will include the form data in the system-wide "Download Backup" CSV file.
Integrated Search Engine
Your BananaPanel content is fully searchable through our built-in search engine. Since it is just a web-service call that is translated into a regular language-specific container by your XML-RPC library, you can easily format the results to fit into your web design.
Simple Mailing List Manager
BananaPanel has a simple interface for creating mailing lists and collecting emails.
Other Notable Features
BananaPanel has several other features in various forms of completion.
There is a rudimentary CRM application so that businesses can manage their salespeople. Each contact and meeting with a potential customer can be tracked with notes. Multiple contacts per prospect company can be listed so that your client can get visibility into who their sales force is talking to.
There is a feature for dumping your client's entire database to a CSV file that they can open in Calc, Excel, or any other spreadsheet program. This gives them the ability to access their information on-demand from a familiar application, and with some tweaks to this function you could let them export other data as well.
The architecture of BananaPanel supports having a hierarchy of customers, so you could theoretically be a host and let other web developers bring their clients onto your server. This is hampered somewhat by the lack of admin tools (see Caveats below) but would still be possible with some work.
Full Web Service Implementation
BananaPanel was designed from the ground up as a web services-based application. What this means is that you can host the CMS and RPC server on your own servers, and your clients can place their website on their servers, and they can still connect to your server to pull down content, place orders via the online store, submit forms, etc. As you roll out new features to your BananaPanel CMS, these are available to all of your clients without the need to maintain separate versions of the CMS on their servers.
There is a simple and easy-to-add-on-to framework for adding functionality to the server, with all calls contained in a single php file.
Since the BananaPanel API uses XML-RPC for external communication, your clients can have their website coded in any language that has an XML-RPC client library. See XML-RPC.org for a list of these implementations.
Full-Featured Shopping Cart
BananaPanel has a very advanced shopping cart, with product type templates to add custom fields, options available at checkout (like shirt size and color), multiple product images, dynamically generated and hierarchical product categories, and other powerful features. It also has a basic credit card acceptance system and can be integrated (with some work) with third-party credit card processor systems.
Several Types of Dynamic Content
BananaPanel features 3 basic types of dynamic content: simple HTML blocks, "articles," and "events." The first category lets you specify a particular named block of content as editable, and your customers can update it in the CMS. The second is very dynamic; it can be used for articles, press releases, "best seller" lists,... anything really. You can turn fields on and off per article type, and tweak it to fit virtually any content scenario. "Events" are much like "articles," but they are presented as caledar events within the CMS.
Dynamically Created Forms
BananaPanel solves the "form problem" often faced by web developers. You simply create a table to hold the client's form data, then fill out the "go_forms" and "go_formfields" tables with the appropriate data, and give their user accounts access to the form un go_userforms." It can even handle select boxes and files. From then on you only need one function call to the server to create your form (complete with CSS formatting) and to place one file (FormBroker.php, available in the "demo.zip" file) on their server.
BananaPanel will add their form to their CMS pages and let them read all the data coming in, and will include the form data in the system-wide "Download Backup" CSV file.
Integrated Search Engine
Your BananaPanel content is fully searchable through our built-in search engine. Since it is just a web-service call that is translated into a regular language-specific container by your XML-RPC library, you can easily format the results to fit into your web design.
Simple Mailing List Manager
BananaPanel has a simple interface for creating mailing lists and collecting emails.
Other Notable Features
BananaPanel has several other features in various forms of completion.
There is a rudimentary CRM application so that businesses can manage their salespeople. Each contact and meeting with a potential customer can be tracked with notes. Multiple contacts per prospect company can be listed so that your client can get visibility into who their sales force is talking to.
There is a feature for dumping your client's entire database to a CSV file that they can open in Calc, Excel, or any other spreadsheet program. This gives them the ability to access their information on-demand from a familiar application, and with some tweaks to this function you could let them export other data as well.
The architecture of BananaPanel supports having a hierarchy of customers, so you could theoretically be a host and let other web developers bring their clients onto your server. This is hampered somewhat by the lack of admin tools (see Caveats below) but would still be possible with some work.
# posted by Mike @ 9:26 PM 
