MicroCyte functionality and features
User management
MicroCyte has a simple user management facility. Users can be a member of one of three groups which can be changed at any time. The user password is stored as an encrypted string for extra security. Users can be assigned edit privileges on a per-page basis. Superusers have total site and user management privileges.
Navigation and page management
MicroCyte has the following navigation and page management facilities:
- Multi-level navigation management
- Full page ordering
- SEO functionality including the ability to edit meta title, keywords and description of any page
- Descriptive page file names based on chosen page title
- Ability to add page description for use on landing pages
- Ability to add dynamic landing page templates using built-in navigation functions
- Ability to add publish and expiry dates to a page
- Ability to add an independent calendar date for use on landing pages
- Ability to exclude a page from the main navigation (whilst retaining it on landing pages)
- Support for multiple page templates
- The ability to change the template of any page without loosing content
- The ability to move pages (and their children) between different sections
MicroCyte can fully manage the website structure using the facilities listed above. Using the navigation API its possible to easily construct landing pages for news and blogs. The navigation API can also be used to construct bread-crumbs and split parent/child navigation setups (e.g. 'other pages in this section').
Content editing tools
MicroCyte has the following content editing tools:
- Ability to set text to bold, underlined or italic type.
- Bullets and numbered lists
- Adding images in-line
- Replace existing images in-place (can be developer controlled which images can be replaced)
- Image library for adding previously uploaded images
- Upload files such as .doc, .pdf, .mov, etc with caption for user download
- Undo and Redo facilities
- Style setting buttons for paragraph, h1 to h5 and Pre tags
- Link library for quickly linking to internal site pages
- Link function for linking to external sites and resources
- Snippet adding facility for adding 'snippets' of pre-formatted HTML (useful for banners and situations where you need more complex formatting than usually available using the default controls)
MicroCyte has comprehensive content formatting tools. Users can edit as much or as little of the page as you want. Simply add '_editable' somewhere in the the id attribute of the element you want to make content managed, this works for spans, divs and images. Users cannot edit where you have not set this attribute.
Auto archive backup
Every time the user makes a change to a page and saves, an archive copy of their page is taken and placed into the archive directory within the website. This makes it easy to restore individual pages in the case of defacement or mistakes and makes it simple to work out how the site looked on a given date (useful for official record requirements).
Comments Engine
MicroCyte has a simple comments engine which makes it trivially easy to add comments threads to any page on a website and add comments threads to page templates so that pages can be created by the user that automatically have commenting facilities. You can quickly and easily remove and edit comments on a page and be notified by email when a user posts comments to a page. This engine requires only one line of code to be activated.
Navigation API
MicroCyte has an extensive navigation API which can be used to generate breadcrumbs, child page navigation, sibling page navigation and main tree navigation. The output from these API functions is standard HTML unordered lists which can be easily styled using CSS. The main tree navigation output incorporates the GRC CSS only fly-out nav HTML structure and there is an example CSS file which can be used with this to generate dynamic fly-out and drop-down site navigation with no javascript requirement.
Whats in the download?
The MicroCyte download is a simple .zip file which has a self contained directory containing all the required scripts, files and images for a MicroCyte website. You can simply drop this directory into the htdocs folder of a MAMP or WAMP install and start using it straight away. There is no install script and no database setup required, MicroCyte should be ready to go the moment you unzip it.
Also in the zip file you will find a folder containing basic documentation in both Microsoft Word and PDF format. This documentation covers basic information on each of the main aspects of the MicroCyte system and should help you get up to speed very quickly. Apart from that documentation you will also find lots of help on this website so if you find you are getting stuck on something then head here and checkout the available screencasts, blog posts and sample code snippets.