Review: Article Manager ver. 1.23

Article Manager ver. 1.23
http://wilsonweb.com/afd/articlemanager.htm

interactivetools.com, inc.
#850 - 609 West Hastings St.
Vancouver, BC CANADA
V6B 4W4
US $299

If you manage an information rich site, with constant articles, updates, news snippets, etc., you'll want to find a smarter way to publish than creating a separate webpage for every story. The answer is found in a class of software designed for content management. Such programs provide a web interface where the article text can added and assigned a category. Then the program automatically puts the article on the web at the same time as it includes the article title and abstract in its menus and search system. The last time I researched content management systems, prices began about $5,000 and rocketed past $1/2 million.

When I began to develop my NetAssisted Biz (www.netassistedbiz.com) website last summer (for those promoting strictly local businesses) I was looking for the easiest possible way to publish several articles each month. Imagine my delight to find an excellent content management system for only $299 that I could install on my own webserver. As I have worked with this product, I have been very impressed with the quality of programming built in.

Installation

Article Manager is not your father's CGI program with a single script or two. The package consists of a number of Perl scripts, HTML templates, and JavaScript routines that work seamlessly with each other. The program uses a flat Perl database from which static HTML webpages are generated when changes are made. While installation is a bit complex, I found it pretty straightforward and relatively easy.

Templates

Article Manager comes with three newspaper-like webpage template sets, any of which can be used out-of-the-box by just uploading a site logo. But unlike many web-interface site builders, designers can completely customize these template sets to produce a unique look, feel, and operation.

An article template provides the overall design of the final article webpage, including navigation system, graphics, and headlines of recent articles. Unlike standard HTML pages, these templates have several database "hooks" that indicate exactly where database fields are placed when the webpage is generated. For example, $art_content$ designates the spot in the template to insert the article body text.

Templates rely heavily on Server Side Includes (SSIs) to insert both navigation elements and a hyperlinked list of headlines of other articles in the same category.

In addition to article templates, the system includes a template for the printer-friendly article pages, home page, category pages, search pages, and advanced search pages. I spent days tweaking the templates to my rather complex specifications, but was quite pleased that I could produce just the look I wanted, consistent throughout the website.

Create a Category

Article Manager places each article in a single category, so one of the first steps in setting up a site is to name various categories. A newspaper site might have international news, local news, sports, business, etc. I selected categories that fit my narrow focus of articles about local businesses that are "NetAssisted" by various Internet strategies. At this point my categories are types of businesses -- retail, service, and churches. In addition I have a "feature length" category and another category for articles about various software packages. Sites can have an unlimited number of categories.

Once categories are designated, they show up as links in the site menu, as well as sections in the Top Headlines list that occurs on the home page. Unfortunately, the category system doesn't include a field to allow several lines of text describing or introducing each category, though you can specify a separate graphic for each category.

Create an Article

The article creation screen is an HTML form that contains spaces in which to paste all the fields that relate to an article -- category, author, brief abstract, article content, date, etc. Several custom fields can be designated by the developer. For example, you could create a field for META keywords, and then place the hook in the article template within a properly formatted HTML tag.

Articles will most often be created offline and then pasted into the article content field. However, once placed within the article editor, you can do the fine tuning using a very nice, built-in, web-interface HTML editor.

The system also allows you to upload graphics from your hard disk to the server, and then place up to 25 images per article where you desire in the text by means of image tags that look like ***image1***.

Articles can be designated as pending, hidden, and visible. Once you save an article as visible, a static HTML webpage is created and links to the article are automatically included in the various menu systems, top headlines sections, category pages, and search systems.

The software developers claim that Article Manger currently handles about 2,000 articles before seems to run slower on many systems. To speed things up, you can place older articles into an archive section. Eventually, developers hope to run Article Manager from a MySQL backend, but that isn't currently available.

Menus and Syndication

The program has an intricate system of menus and article lists, each of which can be set up according to specifications given in the Category Editor. One very interesting feature is a syndication system. A JavaScript tag on another website causes a list of recent articles in your Article Manager site to appear. When one of these links is clicked, the visitor is taken to the correct article on your site.

To give you an idea of the power and flexibility of this system, I sought to design a content managed site where articles were password-protected, but the home page and category pages were accessible to all. Since you can designate separate directories to which articles and category pages are written, I was able to accomplish this rather easily. Abstracts to the articles appear on the front page and category pages, but the articles themselves cannot be viewed without a username and password. However, to make a few sample articles available, I used Unix symbolic links to an unprotected directory. My site has two doors -- NetAssisted Biz (www.netassistedbiz.com) and NetAssisted Church (www.netassistedchurch.com) -- each with slightly different graphics and home page. I was able to duplicate the menus using Article Menu's syndication feature. Some of the menus also appear in the YaBB Forum (yabb.xnull.com/) application included in the site.

Help Screens and Customer Service

Since different people can work with Article Manager, online help screens (www.interactivetools.com/docs/articlemanager/user) are divided into three sections -- user guide, administrator guide, and installation. I found the help screens quite useful and well written. An active online Forum (www.interactivetools.com/iforum/Products_C2/Article_Manager_F2/) is available for developers. Interactivetools also provides knowledgeable and free telephone support for their products.

Bottom Line

I usually probe for weaknesses, but I found this product quite bug-free, flexible, and undergoing continuous improvement. Because of its complexity, developers need to plan some time for template customization, though the program is functional as it comes. The WYSIWYG editor could use a spell checker to aid editors, but that should be considered frosting on the cake. Overall, the program is superb for a very modest price.

Article Manager isn't a panacea for the average small business website. But for information-rich sites that publish lots of articles, news, and updates, Article Manager is top-drawer software that will greatly reduce time from writing to final publication and empowers non-techie editors to handle publication quite easily. Strongly recommended.

Consider a copy for your website.