Communifire, our social networking platform in ASP.NET, contains a ton of functionality…including forums, events, friending, internal messaging, photo sharing, video sharing, blogs, and much more. In addition to the functionality I just briefly listed out, Communifire contains a very extensive and feature rich Article Management System. So, I thought it would be a great opportunity to share those features with you…
Communifire Article Manager features
The Communifire Article manager is an advanced Content Management System that allows your community users to have and share their own voice by posting articles and news under different categories, dynamically. Allowing your users to post and submit articles is a very powerful way to generate content for the community and will increase your visibility in search engine rankings, amplify the stickiness of your community, and encourage the discussions and communication surrounding the content people prefer.
Publishing features
- Publish unlimited articles. The Article manager is created to handle the management of thousands and thousands of articles. We’ve build the software to be extremely robust, scalable, and easy to maintain as much content as you and your community can publish.
- Unlimited categories – Create an unlimited number of categories and sub-categories to organize your articles.
- RSS feeds for all categories – Each category is syndicated using RSS / XML feeds. Your users can subscribe to your RSS Feeds using their feed readers to stay updated when new articles are posted.
- WYSIWYG Editor – The article manager contains one of the most well known and most used rich text editors. There is no need to know HTML to format your articles – just use the built in editor.
- Related / cross reference articles – relate article to others by associating them when you publish them. Related articles are displayed below the article, pointing the reader to content that may be similar
Images, Media, Files
- Upload attachments - Upload an unlimited number of images or file attachments to each article. You can display the images anywhere within your article and non-image attachments will be nicely displayed with your article.
- Image resizing – you set the size of the images that are uploaded. If the images exceed the size you set, they will be automatically resized.
- Image thumbnails – Whenever you upload an image, a thumbnail is automatically generated for you to display as teaser images next to your headlines.
- Embed videos – Easily embed YouTube, MySpace, Google, or any other types of videos into your articles. It’s as easy as copying and pasting the video code into your article.
Public features
- Articles homepage – the article homepage shows a list of all categories (and sub-categories) and a list of the most recently published articles. Each article contains a snippet of the article and also a teaser image that you are able to upload when publishing. Clicking on a category filters the list of articles to display only those articles published into that category.
- Article page – The article page displays each individual article and provides a number of different functionalities to benefit the end user, including:
- Print - the print option displays a printer friendly version of the article, making it simple for your customer to print your articles.
- Download to PDF – clicking on the ‘PDF’ link generates a PDF of your article on the fly, making it easy for your readers to download your article and read it off line. PDF’s are also commonly circulated by email within people networks, helping your article be spread by virally.
- Email / Share with a friend – this option allows your readers to forward articles to their friends or colleagues by email. The emails that are entered are automatically saved to a database so you know where your articles are being distributed.
- Comments - Strike up conversation and allow your readers to comment on your articles. Add unlimited comments to each article. You have full control of how the comments are managed; choosing whether they are automatically published or you can choose to moderate them before appearing publically.
Search engine optimization features
- SEO optimized out of the box – we spent a great deal of time optimizing the layout of the HTML and using the proper HTML tags to help search engines index and understand your content.
- Keyword friendly URL’s – Create keyword friendly URL’s for your articles and article categories. URL’s that contain keywords are often given higher rankings in search results because they appear to be more relevant.
- Customizable H1 tag – You can create a custom H1 tag for each article you create. H1 tags are known as heading tags that describe the content on the page. Search engines are known to give emphasis to those pages with highly relevant H1 tags.
- Custom Page Titles – You can create your own optimized page title for each article and category. Search engines have been known to favor pages with relevant page titles. If you don’t want to create a custom page title, the article manager will use the article title.
- Custom Meta Descriptions and keywords – the article manager allows you to create custom Meta description and keywords for each and every article and category. Search engines often use the Meta description and keywords to describe your website within search results. Provide an optimized custom description to entice users to click through to your articles.
Ok, so there you have it. The features of the Article Manager in the Communifire Social Networking Platform. And if you’re interested in checking out a live social networking running on Communifire, you can check out CodeASP.NET– an ASP.NET Community. You can click here to see the article manager.
And to learn more about Communifire, click here to read the Social Networking Platform in ASP. NET.
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