Better business with Bitrix

Serious Web content management for business sites doesn’t come cheap or, perhaps I should say, didn’t until now. Before I reveal the price of this product (and no skipping to the end), let me outline what this product offers.

The product is called Bitrix Site Manager (see links below) from a company called Bitrix.

Bitrix Site Manager is remarkably comprehensive and consists of 17 modules that include content management, workflow control, help desk, structure management, forums, advertising, newsletter subscriptions, user and group access rights management, traffic analysis, advertising campaign analysis, commercial catalog and localization support.

Several of these modules are very ambitious. For example, the Information Blocks Module is provided to publish news and press releases with optional expiry dating, create hierarchical catalogs of goods and services, specify properties for each catalog, manage the photo gallery, manage vacancy postings, and provide RSS feed publication and aggregation services.

The Statistics Module allows you to analyze visitor streams for individual ad campaigns, track events in ad campaigns, analyze effectiveness of traffic generators, analyze search engines (page indexing, search terms, effectiveness of incoming traffic), and analyze effectiveness of A/B site content.

Then there’s the Commercial Catalog Module, which supports loading data from CSV (from Microsoft Excel) and CommerceML (XML) formats. You can set different price types for each product (wholesale, retail, dealer), control user access rights for every price type and create and manage discounts and additional charges.

Bitrix Site Manager supports a completely browser-based management and editing interface and requires PHP 4.1.2+; Apache 1.3+, Microsoft IIS 5.0+, or Eserv 3.0+; and MySQL 3.23+ or Oracle 9+.

And now pricing: Serious commercial content management systems usually start at $50,000. Bitrix Standard for MySQL is priced at $199; Professional for MySQL is available for $970, or $17,500 for the Oracle version. The Enterprise version costs $1,699 for MySQL and $24,500 for Oracle, while the Web Analytics version is $499 for MySQL and $8,750 for Oracle.

Note that all commercial versions are “delivered with source code that, in addition to the documented API, allows easy development and customization of the site by the organization’s own staff.”

This is a very impressive product and a Gearhead review of Bitrix Site Manager is planned for the near future.