RedDot Content Management Server

RedDot Solutions' content management offerings excel in ease of use, partly thanks to the eponymous red dots that indicate editable objects. Aiming at the lower midmarket, the company cites typical costs (including installation and training) at about $70,000. Implementing RedDot CMS often takes as little as two weeks.

We tried out RedDot Content Management Server, which starts at $30,000 and supports unlimited projects and users, multistage workflow, and built-in version control (for content only, not templates). For simpler sites, there's RedDot Express, an entry-level version for $14,900. The Express version supports only a single project and administrator and a maximum of five users—and omits version control.

Authors and editors who use RedDot's SmartEdit feature to view pages on a staging server see pages as they would appear on the live site, except that modifiable portions of a page are marked with small red dots and text instructions. Clicking a red dot locks that component to prevent conflicts with other users and expands it to allow editing of constituent elements such as a headline, body text, or image. RedDot provides WYSIWYG text modification, and its image browser and upload tool can search metadata.

Changes to content are placed under version control and submitted to a workflow designed by a site builder or administrator—the two most privileged levels in RedDot's five levels of user authority. Workflow can include multiple levels of authorizations and can trigger e-mails to approvers. RedDot supports multilingual sites and can easily notify translators, too. Content can be scheduled with release and expiration dates and can appear on different areas of the site at different times.

For site builders and administrators, building RedDot page templates is straightforward. The process begins with a prototype page created in any Web-authoring tool. Then template creators use RedDot's template editor, replacing specific content elements with simple RedDot placeholder tags. These tags determine a contributor's ability to modify sections of pages. They can include comments and encapsulate relatively complex tasks without extra programming. Templates can construct link lists automatically, based on metadata about objects in the CMS or can call external databases directly. RedDot also makes a full API available. In addition to different-language versions, RedDot lets you create template variations to publish similar information in different formats, such as XML or WML. Site builders and administrators manage a project's overall structure with RedDot's SmartTree browser tool.

The RedDot CMS runs on Windows-based servers, but it ultimately combines templates and content into static pages. When pages are released for publication, it deploys this content to any Web server running on any operating system—even to a basic hosted account. Although RedDot doesn't attempt to provide dynamic content delivery, you can include ASP, JSP, or similar logic in your templates.

With its ease of use and reasonable price, RedDot CMS is an appealing choice for smaller companies looking to get started with content management.