Page Publishing perfection

In the last issue, I wrote about a Web-based customer service solution. Today I want to discuss a Web publishing solution that’s backed by some of the best customer service I have ever come across.

In fact, this product is so good that I actually purchased a copy to run my son’s school Web site. (And, no, I didn’t ask for a discount or use a review copy – I actually paid for it … the publishers have to eat you know.)

The product is Page Publisher from interactivetools.com and the reason I selected it was that I haven’t found another product that can do what this one does.

What I was looking for was a way to let school staff update their own areas of the Web site without requiring client-side editing tools (that is, I wanted to make the editing browser-based) and with no knowledge of HTML. I also wanted to be able to control which user could edit what content.

Page Publisher is based on a simple idea: Wherever you want to have an editable field, you include tags that are specific to Page Publisher. When you log on to the Page Publisher interface you select an entry in the list of pages you have rights to and the system extracts the existing text and presents you with a page on which you can edit the contents. When you are done, the page is re-written and updated with the new content.

Page Publisher tags look like an XML tag:

Content goes here

There are actually eight Page Publisher field types available including plain text, text boxes, WYSIWYG text, URLs, e-mail addresses, images, image selection, and file selection, and the whole system works flawlessly.

Included in the price is free installation – honest. And from purchase to installation, my project took less than 24 hours. The technical support is truly outstanding and you can even re-brand the product at no extra cost to resell so that it is, as far as the end user is concerned, your product.

Written in Perl, Page Publisher runs on any Web server with Perl support and cost – drum roll please – $99. That’s right, a bullet-proof, excellently supported, does-what-it-says-it-does, great piece of engineering with bundled installation that will simplify your Web site for less than you’d spend on a good dinner.

Highly recommended and newsletter writer approved.