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Why Use of “Token Sense” is Common Sense
A lot of thought and effort goes into building and designing certain aspects of one’s website. A website can include interactive calendars, brand enhancing banners or slides shows—or unique and stylized content. Leveraging these items and ensuring their consistency across one’s web properties can save an enormous amount of time and add quality assurance to site.
Pixelsilk allows you to use web tokens to save all kinds of work and let others use it to, which is especially helpful for those building and managing multiple sites. A web token is code that inserts something like this [[“and”]], so the CMS knows what to show where. After creating web tokens, all approved users can just start typing [[name of token]] in editor window and the Pixelsilk token sense window will come up. The window allows you to confirm selected web token. Once you do, it will instantly render element or content right there.
Web tokens can include controls, themes, skins or content—really what you can think up and build using CSS, HTML, JavaScript or a plug-in. Another time-saving benefit is after a token is updated, the update can be easily rendered across multiple sites by a click.
When you consider these benefits, you can see why use of Pixelsilk tokens make a lot of sense and makes a lot of customers happy.
True Multisite Management Pleases Managers
The discussion of multisite management is an important one for companies and agencies who manage multiple websites. Here’s why: A CMS that offers it is more efficient. Its functionality allows one developer to literally do the work of 10 developers because they don’t have to “touch” each site. Site resources, such as a company’s brand look and feel, controls, plugs-ins, images, Java script files can be published—or updated—simultaneously.
When you consider the management of 100 or 1000+ sites, the benefits are huge. Businesses enjoy cost-savings and time-savings; the ability to get the work done with less manpower; and the quality assurance that assets are transferred correctly.
No wonder comparisons are taking place between Pixelsilk, Drupal, Jentla, Plone and WordPress. And no wonder Pixelsilk’s true multisite management is coming out ahead.
Stay-tuned for more. I’m Susan Sano Berado.
The Value of a List Section
Content organized well on the web is becoming more important. If a page is too difficult to navigate through or too hard to find the information one needs, a visitor usually gives up and goes elsewhere. Having certain pages be created as a “list section” rather than just an HTML page helps you avoid this problem.
A list section is a “page type” that displays structured or record-like information really well. Articles, news items or photo/video galleries can be displayed cleanly—and better yet—can be sorted and searched by your visitors. Numerous book listings, for example, can be sorted and found based on a title or author’s name. The ideal vacation property can be pulled up first based on a visitors’ query.
Most Content Management System’s (CMS) don’t offer a list section, but Pixelsilk does. If your CMS doesn’t, you basically have two options: go research possible plug-ins or go hire a developer to build you the right fields for your list section.
With Pixelsilk, you won’t have to do either because it comes with default property fields that can work for any list section type right out of the gate. Pixelsilk lets you define how you want your list section displayed and used. Personalization can be done on a section-by-section (or page-by-page) basis giving you and your visitors many options.
I’m Susan Sano Berado—here are some samples:
http://www.blackbutteranch.com/accommodations/vacation-rentals/
http://www.blackbutteranch.com/Recreation/Whats-Happening-at-the-Ranch/
http://www.smartz.com/about/testimonials/
http://www.ironhorseprineville.com/Available-Properties/listings/
Partner Portal Creates Sites like Magic
If you’re already a Pixelsilk partner, you know the value of the Partner Portal. It can speed up your development time ten or a hundredfold depending on how many sites you’re creating. For those of you less familiar with the Partner Portal, think it’s time we shared the secret with you.
Webmasters Take Note
A Webmaster, like you, can leverage the work of one site in the Portal for the benefit of 1000 sites simply by clicking a box. Once clicked, themes will automatically transfer; CSS files will also seamlessly transfer; and files containing images, text, and media will transfer. In a matter of minutes, you will have created lots of new websites—and be ready for a coffee break.
Ongoing updates are also easy. Let’s say you, and your team, want to release a new red banner on the homepage that promotes a short-term offer. All you, the Webmaster, need to do is make the “resource” (or red banner) available to site in the Portal. As soon as the homepage reloads, the new red banner will be present on your multiple sites. Not bad for a day’s work.
I’m Susan Sano Berado. More thoughts and tips forthcoming.
Cool things to do with Pixelsilk
Welcome to a new feature on the Pixelsilk blog!
My name is Jon and I am one of the “Websters” (web developers) developing sites with Pixelsilk and pushing the boundaries of what Pixelsilk is capable of doing. As you may (or may not) know, Pixelsilk has a fairly extensive front-end Javascript API (application programming interface) and combining that with the popular Javascript “JQuery” library (not to mention HTML, CSS, and judicious use of Flash) there are some amazing things that can be accomplished.
Hence this new “Cool Things to do with Pixelsilk” feature: a series of ongoing articles from me and my fellow Websters highlighting many of these examples and pointing you in new directions and towards new ideas. Feedback, questions, ideas are all encouraged, and you can either leave comments on these posts or email me directly at jon.abernathy -at- pixelsilk.com.