Standard CMS plug-ins

These plugins are supplied as standard with Immediacy as part of our "Sample" site.

Menus

 

Menus in Immediacy are highly flexible plugins based on .NET templated controls. Designers familiar with HTML can quickly be shown how to create beautiful menus by customising some simple CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

 

More adventurous designers can use the flexibility of our menus to create some really stunning and original menus.

 

The following menu plugins are supplied with Immediacy.

 

Tree Menu

Creates a hierachial WC3 compliant multi-level menu from a specified starting point in the website structure. Depending on the CSS styles applied, this menu could be used to generate a site map or animated "drop down" or "flyout" menus. Examples and CSS code are provided. We use this menu on our site for the "drop down" menu at the top of this page.

 

List Menu

Creates a simple single level WC3 compliant menu. Menus can be horizontal or vertical (or even curved if you really like). We have used this plugin to create the "utility" navigation links at the top and bottom of this page.

 

Expanding Menu

This is a sophisticated (yet easy to configure) menu which we use for navigation within sections of the site. As the user "drills" deeper into the site, lower levels of content are revealed. The menu helps to "orientate" users within the site by showing them the context of the current page.

 

BreadCrumb Menu

This menu shows the user the path to the current page from the home page of the web site.

 

Site map

The site map is a simple, yet effective implementation of the Tree Menu that provides a hierarchical at-a-glance navigation of your web site.

 

For more advanced designers or developers, all of the menu plugins allow additional SQL statements (or stored procedures) to modify the menu items returned by the CMS or to even drive menus from external datasources. All without writing a single line of .NET code.

General

 

Access Keys

Adds configurable "access key" functionality to your site. Our public sector solution comes pre-configured with the government recommend set of access keys pre-defined. It is easy to create your own short cut keys.

 

Article Index

Creates an index page for lists of "articles" (eg news, press releases, case studies etc).

The Article Index is highly configurable allowing articles to be selected by category or page location. It enables automatic archiving of articles by date or quantity.

 

Alternating Content

Allows end users to select ranges of content to be updated on a daily or random basis. Suitable for creating banner ads or alternating sections of content. Requires the shared content plug-in.

 

Cross Site Shared Content

Allows content authors to 'embed' content from a page on another Immediacy website into the current page. The content is only editable in the "source" website but is automatically updated on the "target" website if the source page is changed. This plugin uses XML so that websites can share content across the internet or safely through firewalls (subject to appropriate firewall configuration).

 

Embed Application

Allows a content author to embed an external web page or web application into an Immediacy content page. This plugin is fantasitc for quickly integrating disparate applications into a corporate intranet. At a technical level, the plugin uses a dynamically resized IFRAME to embed content from a url.

 

Form Builder

Allows non-technical website administrators to easily build data input forms. Forms can be configured to automatically generate an email response or log the input into a database for later downloading or processing.

 

Global Terms

This plugin allows content authors to select from a pre-defined list of common terms (such as contact telephone numbers, postal addresses etc) and insert them into the content. The term can then be changed once (by a site administrator) and the change will be reflected across all the entire web site.

 

Logon/Log off

Allows a designer to easily create a customised login / logout button without worrying about how this works at a technical level.

 

Page Properties

Allows a content author to publish specific meta data properties about the current page. Currently supported properties include page title, page author, content created date and date last updated.

 

RSS Feed

Allows your Immediacy website to consume consume and export multiple RSS feeds. It is easy for non-technical content authors to "consume" an RSS feed from say the BBC or Yahoo by simply pasting a url to the feed into the RSS graphical front end.

 

Exporting content as an RSS feed is straight forward, but does require a system administrator to copy and edit a simple configuration file.

 

Scroller

Generates list of hyper-links which "revolve" when the list becomes too long for the specified content area. This is ideal for use on a website home page to provide a bit of visual impact and where space is limited. A GUI interface makes it easy for users to add additional items to the scrolling list.

 

PDF Output

This allows on the fly conversion of CMS pages into PDF documents. A site visitor simply clicks on a "download as pdf" link and the system automatically compiles and delivers a corporated branded PDF document.

 

Search

Allows visitors to quickly and easily search through the content of an Immediacy powered website. It requires minimal configuration (which is achieved through a simple GUI interface). The search returns results in order of relevance and results can be restricted based on categories or "last updated".

 

Shared content

Allows a content editor to 'embed' the content from another page. The shared content is visible on both pages, but only editable on the 'from' page.

 

Subscriptions

This plugin allows users to "subscribe" to a particular page. They will then be notified by email if and when that page is modified. The system allows notifications to be sent only when a "significant" change is made to avoid informing users when spelling corrections or other trivial changes have been made.

 

User poll

Allows non-technical website administrators to easily create user poll's which allow site visitors to vote on key topics. Users are automatically shown a bar chart summarising the poll results.

 

What's new

Generates a configurable menu of links to recently modified pages on the site. The plugin can be configured to show (for example) the latest 20 modified pages or pages modifed in the last 20 days.