Site Replication
Create full exact copies of existing Joomla! websites. There is no limit to how many times a site can be copied and held under the management of the one Jentla Manager. Distributed Site Replication is the foundation of the primary benefits of Jentla. It makes it hugely scalable and much easier to manage large numbers of sites.
Hundreds to thousands of sites can be created from a batch CSV listing.
Jentla has very strong features for content propagation between sites using advanced site grouping rules.
Site Admin
Centrally manage user admin, extension installation, un-installation, activation, de-activation and upgrades. Without Jentla, these regular activities currently occupy large amounts of a site admin’s time. Responding to security alerts becomes a mundane activity with Jentla.
Admin Dashboard (site health)
Review the health of all managed sites from one dashboard including site statistics like page views, popular content, response times, outages and security issues. You can easily show management how a group of sites are performing.
Site Groups
Cluster sites together into groups to speed content multisite publishing and aid site admin. For example, group sites by state, or site type. In doing so, it is possible to easily publish the same article to all the North East states where sailing is popular.
Automated Upgrades
Jentla managed Joomla! sites can be upgraded from 1.0.x to 1.5.x as long as the appropriate 1.5 extensions are available to upgrade their legacy 1.0 versions. 1.5.x versions can be upgraded when newer versions are available. The upgrade tool will work for Joomla! 1.6 as well.
The upgrade interface can support multiple simultaneous upgrades.
Site import
Pre-existing Joomla! sites can be imported under the central control of Jentla Manager and their content shared amongst other sites. There is no need for complicated migration processes. It is also possible to leave a site in its existing hosting and manage it Killertely.
The Jentla Component must be installed on the site prior to the import.
Publishing workflow
Content Contributors can work on an article draft before they submit it to a content Approver, recommending which sites and where on those sites the article should be published. The Approver reviews the article and returns it for improvements or recommends it is published. The Publisher has final control over where the article is published. Email notifications are sent at each step of the process streamlining what is often a chaotic process. A publishing workflow is essential on sites where content must be reviewed before publication.
Delegated publishing authority
Publishers can be restricted to publishing to defined sections of a site or sites. On smaller sites, it is possible to merge the Contributor and Approver and even the Publisher roles for the one user.
Front-end ACLs
Highly granular controls over who can view categories and sections of a site or group of sites.
Image/flash/video management
Drag and drop images flash components and videos from the Jentla Digital Asset Manager for easy inclusion into articles.
Version control
All versions of articles are retained permanently making it possible to roll back content. An audit trail is held of all site publishing activity.
Link management and preservation
Links created to content on pages of the site or other sites managed the same Jentla Manager are preserved when the page being linked to is moved. If an attempt is made to delete an article from a page with links back to other pages, a warning saying deleting the page will create dead links is presented. (It is possible to override the warning and continue to delete the page.) SEO marketers can use Jentla as a very powerful link manager to improve site ratings amongst a group of sites.
Content sharing
Article can be shared on many websites. We are progressively making more multisite aware extensions. For example, the image management tool displays very clearly which sites an image has been published to.
Jentla has very strong features for content propagation between sites using advanced site grouping rules.
Site content import
When sites are imported, their content can also be imported. Once imported, the content can be shared to other sites.
High Availability
Application layer High Availability is easy to set up in minutes. Load balancing between any number of Joomla! sites with fail-over if a server crashes can be achieved without database replication.
Infinitely scalable, just by replicating a site, creating a grouping of sites and adding existing and newly replicated sites to the group. The sites are then configuring behind a load balancer. If one identical sites crashes achieved without database replication.
Content updates to the sites, either by the Jentla content management workflow or via user generated content are sent to the Jentla Manager then distributed to the sites, making it possible to keep a group of sites identical.
For even a higher level of redundancy, the Jentla Manager can also be replicated at the application layer to form date replication group.
This entirely Killerves the need for complex database replication and all the associated costs and instability.
Although the sites are grouped, they can be hosted in multiple data centres, making low cost multi-location a reality. Because the data traffic between the locations is limited to content updates, which is very low in volume compared to a database sharing/replication solution, the cost of data traffic is very significantly reduced.
A Jentla High Availability solution can be set up in less than an hour compared to days for a database replication system.
Staging Environments
It is very easy to replicate a production site and use the new site as a staging environment by creating publishing users who have delegated rights to publish only to sections of the staging site. A Publisher with rights to publish to both the staging and production sites can then promote the article into production. In this way, it is possible to carefully preview just like on the production site before it goes live. There are many different ways to take a Joomla! site to production. Below is a guide to how the most common site development processes can be modified to make use of the powerful staging features in Jentla.
Multisite aware extensions
Standard CMS extensions have now capacity to push their output to multiple sites. A series of Joomla! extensions have already been made multisite aware in Jentla like blogging and article and image publishing. We are working on several more including a multisite aware translation system so it is possible to write a translation of an article once and publish it across multiple sites very simply.
Global Replace
Even in a group of twenty sites finding and replacing every currently published instance of a piece of text like a company director’s name is possible but time consuming. If you had to replace that person’s name on every version of every article, meaning the unpublished versions as well, it would be horrendously difficult. Jentla has an automated process to instantly find every instance of a piece of text and to replace it with your new text across all published or unpublished articles.
Merge Tags
Some sites You may wish to keep the Store address and store Manager’s name unique on the store location page but almost all the rest of the website exactly the same as several others. You can define a tag and a tag value for the site in the Jentla Manager. Wherever the tag is displayed on a site, it gets replaced by the that site’s tag value.
Category hierarchy
We have extended Joomla! to add a hierarchy of categories, making it much more logical to add content. This means it is possible to very easily create a complex display of content on a page with Sport articles at the top of a section, then progressively more specific subject areas of sport like women’s basketball displayed very logically underneath.
Auto Generated Menus
We’ve built upon the category hierarchy by making it possible to automatically generate menus by adding content to categories. If a publisher places an article into a category onto a site where the category is not present, but it’s parent is present, the article automatically percolates up to be displayed as a menu item in the parent category. So there is no need to talk to the IT department anymore to add menu items.
CCK
The Jentla CMS is particularly suited to easily creating complex multipage and multi-status forms for the management of such processes as multipage application forms involving administrative workflows, event listings and even fully fledged CMDB systems.
