Big Medium Content Management System

Features – www.bigmedium.com

Content Editing

Browser-based. Big Medium's password-protected web interface allows you to add and edit your website content from anywhere in the world. After installing Big Medium on your server, all you need is a web browser and an internet connection to manage your site.

Big Medium's text editor.

Easy text editing. Big Medium's WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") rich-text editor makes editing webpages as easy and familiar as using a word processor. You also have the option to enter your pages in plain text using the intuitive Markdown syntax, or in good old fashioned HTML.

Fast, one-step publishing. Enter your text or document into Big Medium's page editor and Big Medium files the page under the category you select, automatically updating your home page and section pages with links to the page. It's fast and immediate. No more broken links or manual updating of multiple pages every time you want to add something new.

Manage documents, media and podcasts. Adding documents, including audio and video, to your site is easy. These documents become available for immediate download from your site, and audio and video files are automatically added to your site's podcast. Ta da, you're a broadcaster!

Image management and slideshows. Big Medium manages your library of images, automatically sizing your original images to appropriate sizes for page display, thumbnails and slideshows. Any page in Big Medium can hold an image gallery to showcase your photos, product images, drawings, you name it. You can batch- upload images by providing a zip file of your images, and Big Medium takes care of the rest.

Basic version control. Review the edit history for any page, compare a page's current text to previous versions and, if you like, roll back to a previous version.

Tags. Tag your pages with browsable keywords to help your visitors find similar content.

Visitor comments. Big Medium supports comments on any page, allowing your visitors to get involved. Vigorous anti-spam features, including built-in support for Akismet spam filtering, prevent spammers from posting unwanted messages.

News feeds and content syndication. Big Medium automatically generates RSS news feeds and podcasts to allow your website visitors to subscribe to your site's updates.

One-click editing. Jump straight into editing from any page of the site with your-eyes-only edit links on the published site.

Layout and Design

Big Medium's WYSIWYG style editor.

Custom templates: You control the look and feel. Big Medium uses custom design templates to manage any website in its own unique look and feel. Unlike systems that force you into a cookie-cutter design or a bland three-column layout, Big Medium gives you free reign and can support virtually any design.

Standards-compliant HTML and XHTML. Big Medium produces immaculate markup. CSS-based layouts are fully supported.

WYSIWYG style editor. Big Medium provides a style editor that lets you edit the fonts, colors and layout of your site with a live preview to see the changes before you apply them.

Instant design makeovers. Load your new design template, and the site's entire look changes instantly.

Flexible preferences. Big Medium offers a wide range of preferences to let you customize exactly how it formats the HTML for your site. These preferences can be customized down to the category or subsection level, giving you fine-tuned control over every section of your site.

Site Management

Big Medium can manage multiple sites on the same server.

Manage multiple sites. A single installation of Big Medium can manage an unlimited number of websites on your server. There's no additional charge: all of the websites managed by one installation of Big Medium are covered by a single software license. There are no per-seat charges or hidden fees.

Team collaboration. Allow an unlimited number of contributors to add, edit and publish content. Big Medium lets you register multiple accounts, setting their access privileges to one of five levels of role-based permissions (writer, editor, publisher, webmaster or administrator).

Lightweight workflow. Follow your site content through the editorial process from draft to edit to ready to published. Limit publication permission to certain accounts so that your team can work behind the scenes on content until an authorized editor gives it the nod.

Unlimited categories and subsections. Assign your pages to specific categories, sub-categories, sub-sub- categories, sub-sub-sub-categories (you get the idea). Big Medium automatically generates navigation menus for your categories, including drop-down menus if that's your cup o' tea.

Track your content through four levels of editorial workflow.

Scheduled publication. Set a time for a page to be published to or removed from the site, and Big Medium will take care of it like clockwork.

E-mail notifications. Site editors can subscribe to alerts for events including new comments, new pages or changes in a page's publication status.

Publish in any language. Big Medium uses Unicode, the Web's international alphabet, allowing you to publish content in any language. Japanese, Chinese, Arabic and, of course, all western characters are supported.

Distribute news gadgets. Offer web "gadgets" to your visitors, letting them add automatically updated links to your latest content on their own sites.

Technical Considerations

Written in Perl, runs on any server. Big Medium was designed to run on even the most basic web hosting accounts. It's written in Perl, the world's most popular web programming language; if your web server has Perl installed (and most hosting accounts do), you can run Big Medium. The software requires no additional database technology or sophisticated expertise.

Built-in search. Big Medium’s built-in search engine gives your visitors fast, accurate access to your site’s entire content archive.

Search-engine friendly. Big Medium generates webpages with natural-language URLs that are friendly to search engines as well as your users. Unlike other systems that generate incomprehensible, hard-to- remember URLs, Big Medium lets you choose your own file names and web addresses. Big Medium also helps search engines index your site by creating a special index page that links to every page of your site (using Google’s XML sitemap format).

Manage high-traffic sites. Big Medium builds static HTML pages, without the need to hit a database everytime a visitor requests a page. This means that Big Medium-managed sites can handle as much traffic as your server itself. Big Medium manages sites with thousands of pages, and millions of visitors per month.