February Development Update
We at DynamiX stay busy juggling many tasks, including bringing on new clients, working on and completing existing projects, and providing help to our clients with live sites. If a client requests a feature that would make their SE Content Management System experience richer or more effective, we see this as an opportunity to improve the system for everyone.
In the majority of situations, our SE system has a feature or function that can handle their need already, and we simply make a few tweaks and show the client how to use their new feature. But, on occasion we find an opportunity to simplify the system; or conversely, we may find an opportunity to add an entirely new feature to the system.
Because the SE Content Management System always has and always will be developed in house, we are intimately familiar with the inner workings of the code and database of the system. This means that we have complete control over layout and features of the system, big or small. One of the main goals of the SE Content Management System is to provide you, the site owner, with the easiest possible way to control your site, so if an idea for an improvement isn’t simpler and easier than the existing system, then it isn’t an improvement and the idea gets scrapped (or heavily revised).
With that said, we’d like to share with you some of our recent updates to the SE Content Management System. This month, we have focused heavily on improving our extremely popular “Listings” system. Our goal was to add more features while keeping the system just as user friendly. So, we’d like to briefly list some of the new features we have added to the listings system:
- Full control over the order of listings. Previously, listings could be ordered by their title (alphabetically) or in the order which they were created. Now, SE users are able to change the order of these listing using the same familiar system used to change the order of links in the site menu.
- Full control over the order of listing images. Pictures on each listing page can now be sorted in any order you wish.
- Full control over the titles of your attributes. Attributes can be used for nearly anything. For example: a used car dealership could use them to define a cars: Make, Model, Year, Color and Mileage; a real estate agent could use them to list a homes location, number of bedrooms and baths, price and MLS number. Or, if you prefer, the attributes could simply be used as bullet points. In the past, these attributes could only be changed by us, but now, we’ve created a system that lets you change them any time you want. And, as a bonus, we’ve made it possible to have anywhere from 0 to 10 attributes. If you want to hide an existing attribute, simply don’t give it a title and it will disappear.
- Video Integration. Just like our standard content pages, you can now integrate a video (YouTube or otherwise) directly into your listings, without having to write a line of code. Simply add the link to your video and we’ll take care of the rest.We’ve also made some more behind-the-scenes changes to the SE Framework that make your experience even easier; like improving the file upload system to ensure that file names with special characters or spaces get automatically fixed so that they display properly on your site.
If you are an existing customer and have an idea to make the system even better, please let us know! We look forward to your feedback.
