The first major improvement is a Boolean search engine available to filter the contents’ table, not only their titles but also into the entire indexed content. You can use Boolean operators to refine your search (AND: + sign, OR: nothing, NOT: - sign and WILCARD: * sign). Needless to explain the advantage of this method on a large site with thousands of items!

2.- Workflow

Then you can also notice that several states were added (draft, waiting for approval, in progress) that doesn’t exist in the default Joomla’s com_content that only has three (published, unpublished and archived). In the future these states will be fully configurable, but until that, it already allows you to see more clearly into your publishing workflow. The state toggle is in AJAX and thus doesn’t require page refresh.

As the state togglers are collapsed in Javascript and may increase consequently the page loading time, depending on your computer performance, they are automatically disabled (since the beta4 release) when you display more than 30 items.

3.- Versioning

Another important feature in a collaborative publishing system is the content versioning. Each time an item is saved a backup of the document is created (with all its fields). It is then possible at any time to compare the current version with an older version and to restore it if necessary.

This feature is at its beginning and requires number of improvements. Nevertheless it deserves to exist and can be very handy in cases of mishandling.

4.- Tags

You also have an integrated tags system that allows you build a cross navigation system. The principle of the tagging system is to aggregate heterogeneous elements per idea or concept. The tags can be added through ajax directly in the item form. I also possible to import a full (linebreak separated) tag list from the tags view.

It isn’t possible to categorize or sort the tags!

5.- Favourites and notifications

In FLEXIcontent, registered users of the website may choose to add content to their personal favourites list. They list is accessible via a link in their user menu. It allows them to access faster to the favoured contents and to be automatically notified by the administrator in case of an update.

When an item has been favoured at least once a “notify” checkbox appears in the item form in the backend. If the admin checks this box before saving, all subscribers are automatically notified of the update.

6.- Comments

FLEXIcontent is automatically interfaced with the free GPL JComments component (www.joomlatune.com). Just download it, install it and activate comments support in the general configuration of FLEXIcontent. The necessary plugin is automatically installed and the comments icon appears on your dashboard. You can then allow visitors to add comments on types, categories or specific items.