Designed for you

Smartest is developed with a heavily user-centric approach. Smartest's developers also use it themselves, which means that for once, programmers understand and focus on what would make life easier for the user, rather than the developer.

In addition to what you can read about on this page, as well as the many other existing features you'll find when you install Smartest or browse the manual, there are more than 100 new features slated for release either in or before the 1.0 version.

Design centric from the ground up

Smartest is designed to adapt to your designs and ideas. The best way to achieve the flexibility that makes this possible was to split up the page into smaller, editable elements.

You want a piece of text to appear here and here, and a banner image to go above them both? Fine. You do the design, then just replace the sample text and images with special placeholders and you or your clients can simply move on and focus on which texts and images to use.

After all, who says that every page has exactly one piece of text, and every piece of text appears on exactly one page? well, most of Smartest's competition actually! :)

Automatic Image Resizing

Upload your images in any size, then specify in your actual templates what dimensions you'd like. Smartest will resize and crop your images, saving your photography editor hours of time with the Photoshop slice tool.

Peek before you publish

If you want, you can spend all night tweaking. Edit, save, edit, save, til the sun comes up, but nothing changes on the website until you say so.

How? In Smartest, no content changes go live until you click "publish", though you can preview exactly how they'll look before you do so.

'WYSIWYG' editing

The name of the feature might be really annoying, but in practice it's essential to see how things look before you put them on the internet.

Smartest not only lets you do this, but lets you edit the pages while you are previewing them.

Multiple websites

In a single Smartest installation, you can host unlimited websites. This means that with a single username and password, you can edit and re-publish content on any of the sites.

It also means that, if you want, you can share content between websites so that changes made to an element in one place will automatically update to everywhere else it is used.

Automatic nav generation

Every page is automatically given information about child, sibling and parent-level pages on the site, as well as related pages and items from each model.

Of course, In the spirit of what Smartest is about, how you use this information in your templates is up to you. We just thought you ought to know it was there.

Users and granular permissions

Smartest can support unlimited users, and each user can be granted only the permissions you want him or her to have. So, for instance, you could allow a user to make edits, but not to publish any changes, or to publish changes in some areas, OR to publish, but not make edits.

It's all up to you, and different combinations of permissions can be saved into 'roles,' so that you can create larger numbers of users quickly - all with exactly the right permissions.

Workflow

What happens when two users simultaneously edit the same page?

Trick question. In Smartest this is impossible. While I'm editing it, you're locked out.

In future versions we're going to look at intelligent ways of actually merging the changes.

Build your own informational structure

When you open up a spreadsheet, it doesn't tell you what columns you can have. It starts with no defined columns, and you decide not only information goes where, but what kind of information goes where.

Smartest operates on the same principle, and you can create unlimited 'models' for your content, each with different, typed properties.

Easy template syntax

Thanks to a templating system called Smarty (plus an innovative but little-known corner of PHP called SPL), Smartest templates have an easy Ruby-like dot syntax.

Central files repository

Separating content from pages, so that pages end up being layout, metadata and structure, turns out to have lots of advantages.

For a start, you can keep track of, preview, and modify the meta-data of your individual images, text, movies, audio, or whatever else, independently of their usage on any page.

Smartest's file repository also has a growing number of other nice features:

  • Internal commenting, so that you can correspond with other users about individual files and leave these remarks attached to the files for as long as you like.
  • File grouping, so that once you have thousands of files, you can browse among only those files that you've decided are relevant
  • Store meta-data on any file, so that where it's used the image credit, or whether it should autoplay or not, are already set.
  • Easy internal and external linking. Smartest has a very easy way of creating hyperlinks that works just like when editing Wikipedia.