Invision Power Dynamic is our forthcoming content management system. Invision Power Dynamic is designed to make site creation and maintenance an easy task by automating many common tasks by making use of built in components such as article management, menu management, RSS management and more.
Invision Power Dynamic has gone through some radical changes over the past few months as development has entered the final stages of alpha building and testing. Many new features have been added and many improved.
Invision Power Dynamic Overview
Invision Power Dynamic powered websites are built around pages, templates, blocks and components. Templates, blocks and components are added into pages via special tags. An Invision Power Dynamic page is comparable with a regular web-page. It appears in Invision Power Dynamic's filesystem as a regular page and can be edited, moved or deleted. Pages can accept templates to help re-use common elements. You can embed templates inside of other templates by using the special template tags. Components are special modules which extend the functionality of Invision Power Dynamic. Invision Power Dynamic is installed with several default components, including an RSS import manager, a menu manager and an articles manager. These components are configured independently and are added into templates or pages via their special tags.
Page Management
The screen-capture below shows the overview of the page management interface.
Click to view attachment
The movie below shows the rich interface Invision Power Dynamic employs to make common tasks much easier. You can drag and drop folders and pages into other folders to move them as one would in a normal filesystem. You can also click and hold to edit the filename of the page or folder as you would in a normal filesystem. These features take advantage of rich DOM HTML scripting which don't require a page refresh from your browser.
Click to view attachment
The movie below shows the various options one has when creating and editing a page. Each tab represents a different section. You can make the page an alias of another, make it redirect to another URL or pass off the rendering to a custom module. You can also set up page creation and expiration dates as well as control which permission masks (which are assigned to members and groups) have read access.
Click to view attachment
Menu Management
Every website needs efficient and clear navigation. Invision Power Dynamic automates this procedure with its menu management component. The screenshots below show the overview and edit screens.
Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment
Articles Management
The articles manager is at the core of Invision Power Dynamic's content management system. Articles can be anything, from blog entries, news entries and knowledge base articles to shopping cart items. Each article group can contain article categories which can contain child categories and articles. Each article can accept comments. Each article group can have custom views which are user-defined instruction sets for getting and displaying articles. You can run each custom view past a custom template for some truly custom layouts.
The screenshot below shows an article group's management screen.
Click to view attachment
The movie below shows the ease at which comments can be modified, deleted or (un)published.
Click to view attachment
This concludes this product update. More information on Invision Power Dynamic will be made available shortly and details on how to apply for the first round of beta testing will be announced in due course.