Our Toolkit

Onset can bring a variety of innovative and mature technologies to solve your business problem.

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Content Management

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Visycs CMS

demo

Demo Site

A small, simple site has been set up to demonstrate the basic features and usage of Visycs. If you'd like a guided tour of the demo, send an email to demo@onsetcorps.net, or use the contact form.

Visycs is the Visually Integrated Content Management System - a set of tools and utilities used to update and maintain the content of a site. It is the easiest to understand and use of any CMS we have yet seen - typically anyone can learn to login and manage site content within 10 minutes of basic orientation. And it is also meant to be completely flexible in terms of visual layout and design - using a template system, it can be customized to work with any design or layout. Instead of dictating what elements go where, or how your site should be structured, Visycs is molded to fit your design and requirements seamlessly. Site visitors will never know Visycs is installed - only your staff will as they make updates in the most direct and intuitive way possible.

What Visycs is

Custom tailored framework with a consistent UI. Visycs is a flexible development framework based on sound object-oriented design principles that can bring powerful Content Management capabilities to almost any site. It includes a consistent and simple administrative interface, which is visually layered on top of the site itself. It can also be integrated with other functionality, including product catalogs and e-commerce, technical intranets, photo galleries, community sites, blogs, document repositories, CRM solutions, or almost any other type of application.

Installed and Configured turn-key software. The base installation of Visycs on a new site only takes a few minutes. We then develop or re-use your site layout code (HTML/CSS) and bring into the template system. We configure the specific content types and pages on the site as needed, for instance: News, Events or Products pages. Finally, if needed, we program custom extensions to fulfill any special functional requirements you may have for the site. The site is launched and the tools and utilities are ready for the site administrator to use, no further configuration or setup needed.

What Visycs is not

No expectations, no compromises. Visycs does not attempt to be a shrink-wrapped piece of commodity software you can pull off the shelf and install with a few clicks. There is no cookie-cutter solution that can meet the needs of all the types of sites out there with no customization, despite what any other marketing may say. Most other CMS's come with something extra that is not advertised or talked about - expectations. By installing them, you are agreeing to have certain features on your site, in certain places, and to do certain things in certain ways. If you don't quite agree, you may spend hours wrestling with confusing menus and configuration options, living with a less-than-professional result, or maybe eventually hiring a programmer to customize the sofware to suit your needs.

No design constraints. Furthermore, chances are good you have employed an extremely talented and imaginative designer (or several) - it would be unacceptable for the CMS to place additional constraints on their vision! One of the main goals of Visycs is a no-compromise approach to design. This ensures that no matter what type of layout or visual information strategy your team envisions, Visycs will provide a smooth and seamless interface to the administrator, but remain invisible to the casual visitor.

Features

Secure, simple, in-place editing One unique feature of Visycs is that all edits are made "in-place" - meaning the actual layout and content of the page is displayed to the administrator during editing. The administrator, once logged in, simply browses around the site normally. Content blocks (called "chunks") that can be edited by that user are highlighted - clicking on the highlighted area brings up the editing dialog for that chunk, where the administrator can change text, images, dates or other content as needed. Other CMS's often require users to edit content through a separate form that bears only a remote, abstract relationship to the actual page.

Other features include:
  • Instant "Preview" and "Live" modes - allows administrators to check edits before publishing to the public, or check current public contents.
  • Rich Text Editing - Text content blocks can be edited using a simple tool that allows for visual formatting of the text, similar to a word processor like MS Word. No HTML or special codes are needed, and text styling can stay consistent throughout the site.
  • Versioning - past versions of each chunk are always archived, and can be temporarily or permanently brought back at any time.
  • Individual user logins with group roles - individuals within your team or organization are given separate login credentials, and can be given administrative access rights to various parts of the site and other maintenance tools based on their assigned group membership.
  • Straightforward "workflow" pathway - users can be given rights to change any part of the site, and changes will post per approval by others if required.
  • Static page caching - to reduce server load and response times, some pages or parts of pages can be 'cached' as static content - this reduces calls to the database and speeds the site considerably.
  • Rapid Development - an existing set of extensions allows Visycs to quickly be set up as a blog, product catalog, or image gallery.
  • MVC Architecture - the basis of most modern web software, "Model-View-Controller" is a programming strategy that ensures that Visycs can be customized to work with any design, database structure, or functionality needed, without changing the underlying system.
  • Responsive - Visycs uses AJAX and other buzzwords liberally, to make the interface as smooth and responsive as possible for administrators.

Implementations

The content of this and several other sites is managed via Visycs. A Demo site has been set up to show off some of the basic features of this system - you may view the Demo site here. If you would like to try your hand at updating the demo site or see a guided demo of Visycs in action, or have any other questions about it, please contact us by email at demo@onsetcorps.net.