Chassis CMS follows a simple design philosophy: it manages your content and provides it when you want it, in the format you demand. With the back end running smoothly, you can concentrate on higher-order problems, like providing your users with up to date content using the latest presentation methods.

Chassis CMS’s Web-based administrative front end lets you manage your site’s components easily using the familiar but powerful file-and-folder metaphor. When you use your content, Chassis CMS builds components’ relationships and inheritances, as well as the relationships between them. Though it’s native to the open source MySQL, Chassis CMS can do this seamlessly with all enterprise back ends.

When a page requests content, that content, as well as its relationships and inheritances, are reflected in the XML, available for output. Using XSL, you tailor the output to suit your demands.

Chassis CMS uses XSL to simplify content reuse, but it’s not constrained to XML/XSL. Advanced programmers can work in PHP to perform complex tasks or integrations, for example. APIs are available for you to interact with Chassis CMS using PHP, XML, or XSL, and you can use these APIs to output data in any format that your requirements dictate or that suit your area of expertise.

In addition to Chassis CMS’s graphical user interface, which enables you to structure and categorize your data in an intuitive file-and-folder paradigm, Chassis CMS uses modules to simplify relationships and properties. Standard modules, such as Login, Member, Content, Media, Board, Calendar, Topic, and List handle common and conventional tasks. While most of these modules are fairly obvious in their function (Login, for example, controls who can access the admin tool), others demonstrate the flexibility and extensibility of Chassis CMS. The Content module, for example, can pull in data from other modules, text, images, or video to make new HTML pages, AJAX widgets, or XML services. You can modify, extend, and customize these modules to suit your requirements or build your own modules from scratch.

Chassis CMS lets you…

Manage your content

Using Chassis CMS’s Admin tool, you can collect, manage, analyze, and integrate every piece of the CMS puzzle. Additionally, the Admin tool provides full access control, including ownership, editability, and accessibility, as well as the item’s current status in the publication cycle.

These various data types appear in the user interface as folders, with contained items inheriting selected attributes from their parents. Using this front end, you can build links between components.

The Chassis CMS framework natively uses a MySQL back end. You can use the same PHP classes that Chassis CMS uses internally to develop Chassis-powered sites, minimizing SQL syntax and maximizing flexibility.

Manage your presentation

With a design philosophy that divides content from presentation, Chassis CMS frees you to be creative with your presentation. XSL provides you with the flexibility, consistency, and efficiency of a stylesheet language, and Chassis CMS delivers your content reliably, whenever and however it’s demanded.

Additionally, Chassis CMS’s built-in caching lets you save complex outputs and return them in fractions of a second for subsequent user requests. You can cache complex, processor-intensive objects such as tables of contents, AJAX widgets, media, or overview pages for subsequent requests or for additional reformatting or reprocessing.

Finally, Chassis CMS supports on-the-fly output manipulation (including resizing, flipping, rotating, cropping, converting, and colorizing). Chassis CMS also provides caching for high-efficiency, high-volume graphic throughput.

Manage your growth

Because Chassis CMS uses open source tools and operates over open protocols, you get great value and maximum flexibility. The Chassis CMS API is accessible to legacy data structures and works well with existing PHP and XML/XSL applications. Use any libraries you want: you’re not locked into one solution, and when new technologies emerge, you’re not shackled to the past. You can integrate legacy content and data structures with the latest content presentation tools without exorbitant integration overhead, and if a new demand arises, you can modify existing modules or build new ones from scratch.

When your data structures demand it, Chassis CMS supports a multi-server architecture. This approach enables you to separate content by type or anticipated demand, distributing the retrieval load over several databases. This yields dividends in maintainability, speed, and growth potential.