Peter Sofocleous | Web Developer

Deep today launched Deeplify.com - our new Content Management System (CMS).

We have been working on our new CMS for some time now and its finally ready to share with the world. We took our existing CMS (DeepAccess) and rebuilt it from the ground up. To start off with we built this with Subversion. We did this for a few reasons including so all the developers at Deep could develop simultaneously and we could track changes across different versions. The next change we made was to change the entire structure of the CMS. Our biggest problem was knowing what version of DeepAccess was on what website. Also if some bespoke changes were made to a client you could then not update the CMS without a significant investment (in time & money). So with Deeplify we introduce a centralised core. All our PHP classes and all the HTML for the CMS are centralised. This means if we want to upgrade a file or find a bug we can update it once and it will be upgrade all our clients. No more comparing files and wondering if the world will end if we overwrite something.

A key area of a CMS is how well it can optimise its content for search engines. With Deeplify we have built upon our existing SEO capabilities and expanded it not only in features but in ease of use. Deeplify now supports browser titles, meta keywords, meta descriptions, HTML sitemap and XML sitemap. We have also included a feature to allow the user to view and modify their titles, keywords and descriptions all on one page. So this is much more time saving than the old loading of each page, check the SEO and modify. The HTML and XML sitemaps are also live data. So if you add a page you do not have to regenerate your sitemap.

One of the most impressive features we have developed is called “Live Edit”. An issue some people have expressed is that they type the text content for a page in the CMS and when they come to look at it on the website it does not look the same. This is because the template and stylesheet are separated from the back-end. DeepAccess could preview pages before they were published. So we took this and incorporated it with some fancy coding. Now in Deeplify, double clicking on a text area (in Live Preview mode) launches a popup WYSIWYG editor which updates the page text live as you type. Users can see exactly how the text will render and where it will break on the page. We have received excellent feedback on this feature and we hope to expand on it soon.

DeepAccess also had module based permissions with actions (like add, edit, delete) for each one. We found this was a little to complex so we simplified this. For added security we placed the permissions check on the PHP class rather than in the PHP that was calling the class. In Deeplify, simply drag and drop the module you want a user to have access to.

We wanted to reduce the amount of bespoke work we made for clients. Most of the time we were making a list of one form or another… a video manager, a news manager, etc. So we developed a List Manager. It allows us to create a list by defining its data structure. Then the list appears as a normal module with Deeplify which they can populate with their content. This module is extremely powerful as it means we do not have to code new modules every time we make a website.

Just a couple more features we added. You can now upload multiple files to Media Manager rather than one file at a time. Also we developed a backup module, so you have backup the menu, content, settings and media manager before the user makes any drastic changes. These backups can be restored at any point to roll the website back to an earlier version.

To conclude we feel this is a vast improvement on DeepAccess and we hope it pushes Deep to the next level. Have a look for yourself at www.deeplify.com

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