Silva features
Authoring
- Silva also has a forms based editor for a more structural view of content.
- Underwater, authors produce structured XML that is displayed as HTML in a web page. This also future proofs the information.
- Authors can create an infinitely nested hierarchy of publications and folders to structure content.
- Metadata is stored per content object. Metadata is extensible; new metadata sets can be added. The metadata can be automatically indexed by the Zope catalog.
- Ability to place dynamic elements in structured documents fetching information from a relational database or by calling a script, using Data Sources.
- All text stored as unicode, which means content in multiple languages can be mixed in single documents freely.
- An Automatic Table of Contents feature lets authors create complex listings of documents and other content.
Media
- Images and files can be imported either singly or in bulk
through importing a zip file. Whole directory structures can
be imported creating Silva folders automatically.
- Resize images for web publication. The original high resolution
images can still be exported for printing.
- Silva now provides facilities for cropping images. This tool
combines with the scaling possibilities to give Authors the means to
both scale and resize a high resolution image to web format.
- Extensive abilities to position images in documents.
- Support for Zope's External Editor allows editing files and
images through your favorite editor (including MS Office
applications).
User interface
- Has its own through-the-web user interface with easy access to
all features, including access keys. Authors can only access
sections relevant to Authors, while Editors and Chief Editors
gain more abilities in separate screens.
- User interface internationalized (i18n-ed), so that the user interface can be translated to different languages. Since Silva 1.2, there are English, German, French, Dutch and Traditional Chinese versions. Others are in progress.
- Also possible to descend to the Zope user interface for fine-grained
control.
Language settings
Users can set their preferred language on the user settings page.
Workflow and versioning
- Publication workflow: approval by (Chief) Editor is needed in
order to publish content. Content can be published as well as
expired automatically at a set time.
- Versioning of content. Authors can work on new versions of
documents while a previous version remains published.
- Editor can manage publication status of large quantities of
documents in one screen.
- Silva can be configured to automatically send email to Authors
and Chief Editors for workflow events, informing them about the status of their documents.
- For documents and other versioned content: you can review older versions, compare them, revert the draft version to an older version and remove older versions completely.
- It is possible for site users to subscribe to web pages. They will get an
email message sent to them automatically when a new version of the page
gets published.
Access management
- Separation of responsibilities between Author, Editor and Chief Editor roles.
- Delegation of responsibilities. Editors can approve for
publication, Chief Editors can create new (Chief) Editors and Authors. No one-person bottleneck holding up publication.
- LDAP connection is possible using LDAPUserFolder. Search
interface for people in LDAP when assigning roles, scaling to
large quantities of users.
- Group management (with or without LDAP). Groups can be defined
in a LDAP or other data source, but can also be defined locally
in Zope, as desired.
- Virtual groups to allow cross-sections between other groups.
- IP Groups allow groups based on IP address, to allow access to
selective folders only from an intranet.
- Ability to restrict content viewing access to individual users
or groups of users with Viewer, Viewer + and Viewer ++ roles.
- Users who do not yet have access to edit objects can optionally
be allowed to request this in a user interface.
Documentation
- Extensive documentation for Author and Editors, as well as for
site Managers, designers and system administrators.
- Documentation can be automatically installed.
Site management
- Layout templates; flexible, customizable presentation using Zope
Page Templates. Different sub-sites can have different
publications and designs.
- Configuration per publication making content
available for Authors to add to and edit. It is also possible to completely disable
certain content site-wide.
- Ghosts and Ghost folders allow presenting content in a different
context than which they are authored in. This allows storing
content in a structure paralleling that of the organization for
access rights distribution and delegation, but reusing the same
content inside topic oriented structures for web publication.
- Virtual hosting support. Areas of the site can be exposed in a
separate virtual host for both viewing and authoring.
- Table of contents (TOC) elements can be included in pages to
present the local structure of the site.
- Link to manage references to external sites within the
table of contents.
- All Silva assets (images and files) can be stored on the file system. This produces substantial performance increases.
- Content caching architecture so that the renderings of individual
Silva content objects such as documents can be cached for
high-performance display.
- A quota subsystem lets Managers set a quota on a
publication (which can also be a virtual host root). Containers within
the publication acquire the quota. The quota does not count the space
used by the xml of documents but tallies the assets. The space utilized
is tracked on every container and displayed in the settings screen.
Quotas can be set by Managers in the settings screen of the
publication. The quota subsystem is off by default.
- The Zope Pluggable Authentication System (PAS)
has been integrated into Silva. This means a whole range of existing
plugins are available to integrate Silva with different authentication
services. In addition to LDAP, we have integration with Radius working,
and we've written a plugin for OpenID Authentication.
XML
- Extensive full-media XML import/export system. This exports
document content, metadata as well as file and image asset data in a
zip file.
- Relax NG schemas describing Silva's content model.
- High-performance, pluggable XSLT rendering architecture to display content such as Silva Document using XSLT transformations.
Silva External Sources (extension)
- Enables the flexible inclusion of HTML or tabular data within Silva documents.
- Authors can fill in a form within Kupu or the forms-based editor to parameterize very dynamic scripted content.
- Integration within Silva's content caching architecture.
- Display data from a relational database as a table within a Silva page.
- Upload comma separated value (.csv) data into Silva and display it as a table within a Silva page.
Silva News Network (extension)
- Create and manage news and events in Silva.
- News can be aggregated from various areas of the site,
reflecting the structure of your organization.
- Subsites can have their own news displays, while the main page lists all news items.
- Display news pages and/or agenda pages.
- Make news available as RDF/RSS.
- Aggregate news feed from other sites. SNN reads all feed formats.
Technical
- Open source & Free Software (BSD license).
- Integrates with Zope Page Templates, DTML and Python Scripts.
- Using Silva External Sources, ability to integrate with data
coming from relational databases through SQL. Custom objects can
also be created that retrieve data from relational databases.
- Extensible Model/View/Controller architecture for both the
editor and user interface.
- Silva can be extended with new custom objects.
- Can be configured to integrate with Apache web server and Squid
cache.
- Cross platform; runs on Linux, Solaris, Windows, Mac OS
X and IRIX.
- Silva can be accessed by a WebDAV Client.
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