Saral CMS Blog

As they say  “a picture is worth a thousand words”, the best way to introduce Saral is with a picture.

(click on the image above to see it in full size)

As you can see, Saral is really an infrastructure component that facilitates the creation, management, distribution and publishing of content.  Period.

Saral addresses the need for three groups of users:

1. Content authors, editors & publishers
2. Application programers (Content integrators)
3. Content Managers/System Administrators

1. Content Creation
   For many businesses such as news organizations and publishing houses, content is their most valuable asset.  There is usually a separate content management team consisting of content authors, editors and publishers that is responsible for creating the content.  For these group of users, Saral provides:
   • A web based content editor for entering content into Saral. The content authors have the option of creating the content in any other tool and import the content directly into Saral.
   • A customizable work-flow engine for content authors, editors and publishers to manage the content workflow.
   • Content translation service for translating content in various (supported) languages.
   • Content versioning by language.
2. Content Management
   For content oriented websites such as news portals, entertainment and sports websites,  keeping the content fresh and relevant is a key to keeping the traffic flowing and attracting visitors.  For such sites Saral provides a comprehensive life cycle management for the content:
   • All content is organized in a hierarchical tree to any levels
   • All content (at any level) have optional “publish at” and “expires on” properties that can be set to make the content appear and disappear at scheduled times.
   • Content can be randomized such that different visitors to your site will see different content on the same page.
   • Content can be edited and re-distributed directly for a live site without  going through the content management work-flow. This is critical for quickly correcting errors and removing objectionable content from your site.
3. Content Distribution
   Content Distribution Networks (CDN) have been around for a long time.  Companies such as Akamai and Navisite cater to the high-end market segment that require  global distribution of content across the world. With the advent of new entrants such as Amazon Web Services (S3, CloudFront), CDN is becoming accessible for small to medium size businesses. The Software-As-Service (SAS) and “Pay -As-You-Go”  pricing models have made CDN affordable to many who could not justify the up-front capital cost of purchasing a license OR long term contracts.

   Saral comes with a built-in integration with Amazon’s CloudFront Contnet Delivery Network.  With Saral, you do not have to worry about subscribing to Amazon Web Services and manage the distribution and delivery of your content.  Saral provides the full life-cycle management for your content in the CDN including, distribution, publishing, un-publishishing and refreshing the content from a single administrative console.

4. Application Integration
   An important concept of Saral’s product design is the separation of content from the application.  Saral is a self-contained content management system that is independent of any platform/languages/frameworks. Content stored in Saral CMS can be intgrated into any website regardless of the web server platform or implementation languages. Saral provides client APIs for the most popular web-server platforms: Java, PHP, Rails and Microsoft .NET.

   Release 1.0 of Saral provides a Rails plug-in for integration content into a Rails application. Similarly it provides a JAR library for  integrating the content with any Java based website OR application. Future releases will extend the support to PHT, .NET and other platform as required by the customers.

admin Rails Content Management System, Saral