Your website should be working for you, but sometimes, it feels like you work for your website. Keeping up with content changes, updating images and coordinating the efforts of everyone involved with your website seems to increasingly eat up your time.

 

You know that Elite CMS is easy for even computer novices to use, and it speeds up the common and not-so-common tasks of day to day maintenance, but how can you be sure that it will provide for your needs? 

Elite CMS is implemented atop one of the most powerful and common web platforms, the Apache web server running on the Linux kernel. Apache, the worlds leading web server (3 times more popular for Internet domains than it's closest competitor, Microsoft, according to Netcraft, Dec 2003) provides a rock-solid foundation for any web-based product.

 

Linux has become one of the most popular platforms for hosting Internet sites and applications due to it's reliability and flexibility in a networked environment. Specifically, Elite CMS has standardized on RedHat Linux and Debian Gnu/Linux as the OS vendors due to their ease of management and quick response to security issues.

 

Elite CMS itself is primarily written in Object Oriented PHP, a programming language highly integrated into the Apache webserver and perfectly suited for designing web applications. PHP has become by far the most popular platform for designing Apache based web applications, nearly 3 times more popular than Perl (securityspace.com, Dec. 2003), and allows rapid development and deployment giving Elite CMS an edge over competing software.

 

To round out the portfolio, the Elite CMS backend is provided by the highly capable ORDBMS PostgreSQL, developed at University of California at Berkley Computer Science Department. PostgreSQL pioneered many of the concepts that other database systems rely on today, and provides a robust and fast central storage for website content. 

How Fast Is It?

Since its release in November of 2001, Elite CMS has been designed for scalability. Each major CMS task can be separated onto its own server or cluster of servers (called worker bees) which allow an unlimited and nearly linear ability to grow, simply by adding more servers. Each Elite CMS installation is called a Drone and is capable of providing Web (CMS), FTP, E-Mail and Streaming Media services. An installation can be as small as a single server running all of the necessary worker bee services on one box, or it can be massive with each worker bee being comprised of many servers tied together into a cluster. See the illustration below for an example configuration for the Enterprise Edition of Elite CMS.  

 

(click to enlarge)

 

Of course, any “solution” that is unable to meet your needs is not really a solution at all. Elite CMS implements an API that allows new functionality to be added with ease. Applications can be designed into the CMS itself, or if your existing application exposes a web service, the CMS can act as a front end capable of extending your application to the world.

 

The benefit to using Elite CMS as a front end for your application is that it allows you to re-use all of the existing functionality of the CMS, including simple form creation and management, a built in WYSIWYG editor, advanced media file handling, web-site templates and security. Having these tools available at your disposal means a drastic reduction in the amount of time needed to bring your project online.