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About This Site

The Enfold Systems' website leverages the Enfold product line to provide this modern, robust, scalable and secure website. A brief overview of the technologies which were used to produce this website;

Enfold Server

S_boxsetdouble4.jpgContent is created, edited, and managed on Enfold Server in a Windows environment - with Enfold Proxy to improve overall handling and performance.   Editors use their Window’s domain login credentials and their roles are defined by their permissions in the active directory service.  Enfold Server brings a robust, enterprise content management system to manage and maintain this site’s content.

All of this happens in our Intranet, behind our firewalls.   Our editors’ login information is never exposed to the internet, and no one outside our intranet has access to our Enfold Server at any time.

 Entransit

entransitOnce the content has been created, edited and approved for publication, the content is published to our web servers using Entransit.

We’ve elected to have Entransit deploy content as a series of JSON files on the file system (Managed by a mysql index), however we could have just as easily deployed as XML files or even directly into a sql database.

 Linux/Apache/Mysql/Php (L.A.M.P.)

Once Entransit has deployed the content we use standard LAMP (Linux, Apache, Mysql, and Php) technologies to render the content that was created in Enfold Server.  We use a light framework to translate plone URLs into web-server URLs and render the content inside our HTML templates.   We also use PhP to implement the registration and ecommerce sections of this site (areas which are not managed in Enfold Server).

Bringing it all together

The benefits of this architecture are many.  First and foremost, our business processes occur behind our firewalls, under our security policies.   User’s security information stays in our intranet, and only information that has been vetted and approved leaves our intranet - when we decide to publish it to the outside world.

Secondly, business processes often change more slowy than our website.  While our content management workflows remain the same month after month, we can easily redesign our website again and again (and again) without disrupting how content is managed by our users.

In addition, we can take advantage of the abundant knowledge and expertise of the large base of web-designers, programmers, and agencies - any of whom can take XML, JSon, or MYSQL Data and create any kind of site.  By using Entransit to publish our content in an easily digestible format, we are able to leverage standard web-technologies to lower the overall cost of the site and more easily provide solutions such as e-commerce that are more complex and expensive to implement in Plone / Enfold Server alone.

Finally, by using standard LAMP technologies to render the content generated in Enfold Server we leverage the full speed and proven scalability of web technologies.   While it’s more than possible to scale Enfold Server alone (and desirable in certain circumstances), it is often more cost effective to scale a LAMP system.

If you would like more information on how this website works and operates, or to see if we can help you leverage these technologies for your business, please contact us!