Gentics Portal.Node PHP Guide

Chapters

1. Introduction

2. Functionality

3. Technical properties

4. How does it work?

   • Using Gentics Portal.Node PHP with Gentics Content.Node (Enterprise CMS)

1 Introduction

Gentics Portal.Node PHP is a web portal for presenting personalized contents. A web portal is a web site that brings information from various content sources in an interactive and personalized way to the end user in the browser. It has a lot of capabilities and has many ways to be customised for your needs.

It is implemented by using modern web technologies which help to increase its performance and security in general.

2 Functionality

Gentics Portal.Node PHP can be considered as set of functionalities which you can combine in different ways.

This functionalities allow to use:

1. Registration/login/logout/edit profile of the user
2. Add different roles to users and control permissions depending on these roles
3. Commenting contents
4. Like contents
5. Create blogs and wikis in your internet website or intranet
6. Search for contents
7. Search for users and add users as friends (social networking)
8. Use blog, wikis and other collaboration functionality
9. Use different ways of personalised navigation (top, subnavigation (tree), breadcrumbs, sitemap)
10. Show tagclouds and personalized content overviews
11. and more to come …

3 Technical properties

The portal meets the following six criterias: “Secure, Fast & Scalable, Easy enhanceable, Tested, Documentation available”

Secure

We checked it for main security problems (SQL injections, XSS, …) – the portal defeat attacks from security consultants. The portal uses a well-known and secure framework as a base.

Fast

100 concurrent, personalized requests must be at least possible per server (8-core, 16 GB RAM, …) with extensive using of caching strategies (this makes it possible to service 3.000 users at the same time per server).

Scalable

The portal can run on one, two, three frontend webservers and more. If one server crashes, the user shall continue to surf on the other servers. Databases can be configured in the way “master-slave”, so you can use more than 1 database. The load balancing between the servers must be done by hardware load balancer / third party software.

Easy enhanceable

We deliver the portal with various modules. These will be updated regularly and can be used customized by configuration/themes. If you want to change modules, modules have to be created in or moved to a customized section /custom (client-specific). Please be aware that these modules are not part of our maintenance contracts.

Tested

The deployment of new releases of the enterprise portal includes automatic unit-tests. This is an important factor for high quality.

Documentation

All modules are released with proper documentation (guides and API documentation).

4 How does it work?

There are two ways of using Gentics Portal.Node PHP:

1. As standalone application with set of predefined components which can be widely used
2. Integrated with “Gentics Content.Node” (CMS). This allows you to manage content inside the CMS, but have all dynamic features provided by Gentics Portal.Node PHP

4.1 Using Gentics Portal.Node PHP with Gentics Content.Node (Enterprise CMS)

The CMS publishes content in two ways:

1. into a file system with folder structure (static way),
2. into a database (dynamic way).

In the static publishing process all contents are published in a folder structure below one global directory like /Content.Node/.

In the dynamic publishing process all contents are available through Gentics Content Connector

If visitors request a page in this directory, the portal will handle the request, do all the authentication and authorization processes and then display the content.

If visitors request an application URL, the portal does the handling of the request and then shows the application based on the standard MVC-functionality.

Various functionality implemented as widgets can be displayed within a CMS page, i.e. tag cloud, comment module. You can place widgets everywhere within a CMS page.

You don’t need any technical skills for doing that.