The Genesis of the Personalized Web Experience
Today, we're going to do a deep dive into the platform. Solodev made major strides in their product roadmap this year from being just another player in the enterprise content management space to disrupting the space by becoming the world’s first enterprise content management system available on-demand in the Amazon Web Services Cloud.
On top of their move to the cloud and all that entails such as unparalleled levels of security, scalability, and reliability, Solodev also shifted its focus towards empowering marketing teams to use Solodev to target customer segments with tailor made content.
Solodev also rolled out a new short code language to make web development in Solodev easier for the non-technical user. Other features rolled out include its own website analytics application as well as Solodev Experiments which allow you to A/B test pieces of content against one another. Last and certainly not least, 2016 marked the first year Solodev released a Windows flavor of their flagship product. The combination of these major strides makes Solodev a serious contender in the enterprise content management space in 2017.
Now let’s take a look under the hood…
Enterprise Features
Solodev includes enterprise features such as multisite management, granular permissions, content scheduling, staging, and publishing, approval workflows, versioning, digital asset management, and just about every other standard enterprise CMS feature on the market. Like all aspects of Solodev, however, they have made major strides in their enterprise product feature set as well, improving existing features and adding new features such as:
* Native Analytics
* CodeMirror to enhance “in CMS” coding
* Templating Language (Short Codes)
* Theme Importer
* Drag and Drop Form Builder
* Improved SEO-friendly URLs
* Solodev Experiments for A/B Testing Content
* Table Schema Editor
* New Meta Tags for Social Media
* Redesigned Dashboard
What sets Solodev’s enterprise features apart from their competition isn’t the mere existence of their feature set; it’s the way they implemented their features both old and new to improve their ease of use and maximize the desired effect of the function of every feature. Moving on…
Custom Applications
One of the coolest things about Solodev is its application development framework, which utilizes “modules” to enable you to build literally any custom web application you can think of.
The role of an application or “module” in Solodev is to manage how data entered into the module is displayed on your website. Modules are extremely powerful and creating your own is fairly easy due to Solodev’s extensive documentation and optional short code language. Solodev allows you to customize which entries are included, how the entries' information is displayed and what information you want to be displayed on your website.
Solodev also provides short codes that you can use to print this data on your web pages. Again, this is all thoroughly documented and Solodev is kind enough to provide the sample code that powers their most popular enterprise modules, which you can customize to fit your needs.
Develop Websites Faster with Solodev
The staple of the Solodev Web Experience Platform is a templating system that speeds up development time by preventing the need to duplicate HTML code during web development. When you build your website in Solodev, you build what are called “page templates” such as your home template, sectional, and content templates, etc. When adding web pages to your website, you can simply use these page templates and insert new content into drop zones within those templates. In essence, you can build a 50,000 page website and only actual code three templates in a matter of a few hours. Solodev is definitely at the frontier of streamlined web development within a CMS platform.
As a standalone CMS for the Enterprise, Solodev has everything you need and perhaps a bit more. What makes Solodev particularly unique from a web design perspective is its “blank canvas” philosophy where it doesn’t restrict you or force you to compromise on design. If you know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you can begin coding your website within minutes of purchasing Solodev directly in the platform. And as if that wasn’t cool enough, Solodev is one of the only web development platforms that actually allows you to see what you are building as you are building it.
Solodev is currently offering a 14 Day Free Trial of the Solodev Web Experience Platform. This includes an instance of Solodev on an Amazon EC2 server as well as 50GB of storage, 2GB of memory, as well as email and chat support.