Get More With Manila
From a feature perspective, Manila 9.6 represents a major milestone for weblog publishing systems in creating a truly viable alternative for organizations looking to use weblogs to decrease reliance on overburdened email systems for both internal and external communications.Manila 9.6 lets you quickly and easily build websites, weblogs, and communication portals that bring people and information together through its legendary Edit This Page functionality. Manila is loaded with features that can be used to manage product catalogues, facilitate collaboration, manage projects or empower users with almost any other communication dependent business process. Read what the what the experts have said about Manila's exceptional power and usability.
As you would expect, complete RSS (really simple syndication) support with separate feeds for each site, comments, discussion group posts, and news item departments (categories) is standard. Full RSS integration makes it easy to route items from feeds into or between your sites. There are also some great new tools to help control comment SPAM as well as a simplified interface for Preferences and Admin functions.
Manila remains the secure, flexible, standards-based web publishing system with the most powerful range of features and functionality in its class as is offered without licensing limitations on the number of sites you can create or the number of authors contributing to those sites. Features include:
Version Control
Version Control gives managing editors the ability to create an audit trail of changes to posts (discussion group messages, stories, and pictures), preferences edited in the advanced preferences section that affect how the site looks and behaves, and changes made by some Manila plugins. Depending on the configuration, members and/or editors can use the audit trail to restore earlier versions of individual messages or preferences. To make it easy, new pages in the preferences and admin menus show versioning configuration, settings, and a snapshot of the recent audit trail.
Access Control
Access Control allows the site manager to limit access to messages of all types - news items, pictures and stories - completely or for a designated period of time. Access can be defined on a read/write basis. No read access means that you cannot see (read) a message. No write access means you can see the message but cannot respond to it.
Interface Improvements
Interface Improvements include auxiliary templates so you can easily customize your Manila site's appearance by department or category or just select a new look every month. We have also re-organized the Preferences and Admin pages, simplified their organization, and let you sort pictures and stories alphabetically.
Spam Control
Spam Control has become a key concern for anyone running a weblog site. Manila 9.6 continues its leading role with support for a two-step member signup with email confirmation. When a new member signs up to the site, they are required to click a link in the confirmation email before becoming a member of the site, making it harder for spammers to create fake members to post spam messages on your site. UserLand is also pleased to announce support for the NoFollow attribute: an anti-spam feature, which prevents some search engine crawlers from following user-submitted links and is intended to discourage spammers from posting to your site in order to boost their search ranking. Comment / Trackback enhancements have been added to make it easier to manage Comment/TrackBack deletion and permalinks.
RSS - Syndication Support
RSS Syndication Support with separate feeds for each site, comments, discussion group posts, and news item departments (categories). Full integration makes it easy to route items from feeds into or between your sites. Support for the Atom format increases compatibility with other tools.
Content-Only Versions of Manila Pages
Content-Only Versions of Manila Pages supports a content-only rendering feature which allows you to request a version of the page with only the body of the page displayed.
Email Integration
Email Integration with Mail-to-Weblog integrates Manila with email so you can post to your site while you're on the go, even from your PDA or cell phone. Enhanced email bulletins feature lets you easily send email alerts about important posts.
Support for Multiple Departments and Content Categories
Support for Multiple Departments and Content Categories allows any post to be associated with more than one department and may optionally appear only in the department and not on the home page.
Integration with Existing Sites
Integration with Existing Sites through FTP Support allows your sites can be "rendered" to any server or ISP which supports FTP. Using rendering, your Manila sites can be seamlessly integrated with your existing web presence without the need to transfer your existing content.
XML Member Profiler
XML Member Profiler allows you to gather the user information you need automatically with XML-specified templates. Because the member profiler is customizable, you can build a database of information about the partners, employees, and customers who use your site.
User Hierarchies
User Hierarchies allow you to manage your site content like news services manage theirs by creating custom user hierarchies with managers, contributors, and members. Each group will be able to make only the changes you authorize, enabling ordered, efficient communication.
Design Control
Design Control creates an environment with the ability to change the look, font, colors, and more for any of your Manila weblogs in minutes all without affecting the underlying content.
XML-powered Web Services
XML-powered Web Services allows Manila to automatically turn your content into an XML feed that you can syndicate to internal and external stakeholders, streamlining the flow of important information.
Full Content Management
Full Content Management means that you can store documents of any type, provide sophisticated comment moderation, and create discussion groups for various topics. A simple interface allows you to easily create pages and change the site navigation to fit your needs. With templates, macros, and organizational capabilities, Manila lets you create sophisticated sites for a fraction of the price of many content management systems. Manila is also standards-based and can also integrate information from diverse sources through COM, ODBC, HTTP, XML-RPC, and SOAP. With Manila, the possibilities are almost endless. You can maximize the impact and effectiveness of your Manila sites using CSS, JavaScript, and custom templates and navigation.
Learn more about Manila's Features from a User Perspective.
