01.09.2023

Straight from the workbench: content.life 4

The "Claw Hammer" is the result of 3 years of intensive work on content.life.

Mobile Screens: contentlife 4 on Phones © echonet communication

The next generation is here.

In the spring of 2020, almost at the same time as a massive change in the way of working due to the outbreak of the Corona virus CoVid-19 (SARS-CoV-2) with home office and many other circumstances, the agency echonet has started working intensively on the next generation of the content management system content.life. With the launch of the new ticketing and programme platform for the Musiktheater an der Wien - the opera house in Vienna - the first project for external clients based on content.life 4 "Claw Hammer" finally went online on Saturday, 23 April 2022.

New user interface, new template system, new technology

The system content.life 4 "Claw Hammer" has got a completely new user interface. The system is - as you can see in the picture - now also responsive and therefore also optimised for the use on smartphones. After intensive analysis, the login process was split into two parts and also provided with a background system for encryption, so that the system has also improved in terms of security.

TWIG as a template system

The template system of the new content management system is the open source solution TWIG, which now, after 18 years, replaces the system X-Template, which was further developed by echonet itself. TWIG has considerable speed advantages when it comes to rendering content on web pages. The system is used in the front-end on the websites as well as in the back-end of the CMS content.life 4. Tests of content.life 4 templates compared to previous versions show a speed advantage in rendering between 250 and 600 percent increase.

User interface, dashboard and more...

From "drag & drop" for uploading files to a completely new interface and a charming dashboard with "find-as-you-type" search, content.life 4 has many beneficial features.

The intention of content.life 4 "Claw Hammer" is to make projects fit for the next decade. The new CMS content.life 4 is supposed to be a content management solution for the 20s of the 21st century. The agency echonet is now also starting a very short update cycle, which also allows new ideas and trends to be quickly taken into account in content.life 4.

With the dashboard of the early generation, a first interface has been created in content.life 4, which also allows for a meaningful and clear evaluation of the actually available data. Things that have long been recorded in content.life - already in the previous version content.life 3 in 2004 - are now made accessible in a better and clearer way. In addition to a lot of feedback from echonet's customers, a series of own thoughts has been incorporated into the development, which should simply make the content management system better than the previous generation.

content.life 4 "Claw Hammer" has a very simple reason for existence: we want to be better with it today than we were yesterday, and we will want to be better with it tomorrow than we are today.

Presentation of the new CMS

Due to the almost unchanged database structure in the background, it is possible to migrate from conent.life 3 to content.life 4 and to take over contents. Of course, numerous additional functions in content.life 4 still have to be added, but the environment from content.life 3 is in principle technically compatible with content.life 4 and thus the content can be taken over without having to "rewrite" the page. Presentations for content.life 4 can be requested online at any time.

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