Psycms

Psycms is an excellent content management system with a primary focus on scientific audiences. It offers tools and features to create, manage, and analyze questionnaires and surveys, apart from the typical CMS functions. Let's dive into some of the key features of Psycms.

The system boasts an object-oriented design where almost everything is an object, following computer programming theory paradigm. The object-oriented approach includes features like typing, inheritance, method (action) calling and overloading, inter-object binding and more. There are various object types, including section, article - static content, questionnaire, message - a piece of news, comment - a comment on another object, file, image, image gallery, FAQ - Frequently Asked Question, forum board, message browser, comment browser, file browser, FAQ browser, user, group - a user group.

The system has a flexible privileges system and allows importing/exporting object structure information from/to XML, ensuring a secure and straightforward way to backup objects and transfer them between multiple websites. The system has an easy, step-by-step graphical installer and a graphical, web-based administration system. Users can log in and do what they have been privileged to do. In case of accidents, we have a standalone recovery program in the Installer, which sets some critical system settings to their default.

Psycms can deal with PHP safe_mode, which many web administrators implement to enhance shared-security problems. The system can detect safe_mode and offer users directives to create directories instead of installing patches or discombobulations. With multi-level cache systems built-in, page generation is quicker, and as the system restores objects from the second level memory, connection with the database is not always necessary.

The system offers support for friendly URLs, allowing users to access web pages in a user- and search engine-friendly way (mod_rewrite Apache module required). Users can access the same page via a short or long URL, depending on their preference. Psycms offers users the ability to create localized versions of objects in many languages, reducing the need to create a new version of an object in a new language. The system supports English and Polish but offers users the opportunity to translate the content into their language of choice.

The system also includes themes through Cascading Style Sheets and ensures compliancy with W3C Web standards. The Upgrade Wizard enables straightforward system software upgrading without exposing data to the risk of being lost. The system also includes mass user e-mailing functionalities, allowing users to send e-mails to a group of users. Users can control deleted objects and manage them effectively with the Trash functionality.

Overall, Psycms is an impressive content management system that requires a web server (Apache recommended) with PHP >= 5.1 scripting enabled, MySQL >= 4.1( More database engines soon). The new version of Psycms also includes AdvancedQuestionnaire, a flexible research questionnaire with a C-like language for statistics computing and RSS 2.0 news feeds. The new version can also support memcached, eAccelerator, and APC.