Silva features

Authoring

Silva includes Kupu, a WYSIWYG editor that provides many features:

Full Silva integration; Kupu knows about special Silva elements and saves Silva XML transparently.
Copy and paste HTML from any source (web page, word processor) into Kupu.
Works in Internet Explorer (5.5 and higher) and Mozilla/Firefox.
People who work with Word should be comfortable with Kupu as the interface is similar.

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.