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Features

Reason has a host of features that make hosting the web presence of both large and small organizations a breeze. With Reason you can:

  • Create any number of sites with a single installation
    • Categorize sites to create an automatic organization-wide site map
    • Tag sites with keywords to create an organization-wide A-Z index
    • Assign editing rights for each site
  • Use What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editing
    • Easy to learn for content maintainers
    • A simple, semantically focused interface avoids "tag soup" and puts an emphasis on semantic, standards-compliant markup
    • Comes bundled and highly integrated with TinyMCE 4 - complete with plugins for linking to Reason images and pages
    • Editor plugin API allows you to integrate any editor you want and use different editors for different Reason minisites.
  • Share content across multiple sites
    • Helps reduce duplication of content
    • Helps content maintainers discover new items available for their sites
    • Foster collaboration among groups within your organization
    • Helps keep your site up-to-date — updates happen in one place and are automatically applied wherever the item is used.
    • Read more about sharing in Reason
  • Rely on Tidy for clean markup
    • Ensures that all markup in the system is xhtml-compliant
  • Enjoy full Unicode support
    • One installation can support content in multiple languages
    • Reason has been tested for most major languages
    • All pages and storage are encoded in UTF-8
  • Access a full version history for any item
    • Easily revert to any prevous version
    • Compare two versions of an item side-by-side
    • Reduce worry among content maintainers that they might break their site; they can always revert to an earlier edit
  • Customize your sites with an XHTML- and CSS-based theme system
    • Reason comes with a library of predefined themes
    • You can create new themes using CSS or by creating new xhtml templates
    • Site maintainers can select themes for their sites using an intuitive interface
    • You can determine which themes are available for selection, and can set which sites may change themes
  • Reduce server load for high-traffic pages with a cache
    • You have control over which sites use the cache system
  • Publish information via RSS
    • Reason creates integrated RSS feeds automatically for many common data types, including blogs, newsletters, faqs, events, etc.
    • Modular feed system allows straightforward creation of new feeds with light programming
  • Create unlimited blogs and newsletters
    • You can give site maintainers self-service blog and newsletter creation and setup
    • Flexible blog/newsletter module provides a variety of features, including: commenting, categories, moderation, issues, archiving, and more
  • Manage images
    • Automatic thumbnail and default resizing both makes the process easier for content maintainers and helps encourage standardization across sites.
    • Batch image import simplifies publishing multiple images
    • Content maintainers can set up image galleries as needed
  • Manage multimedia
    • Store transcripts, descriptions, and other metadata
    • Multiple alternate files can be attached to a single record for highly normalized data
    • Every set of media items in Reason is automatically given an RSS feed for podcasting
  • Manage documents
    • Content maintainers can upload documents of any type
    • Documents are easily linked to within the integrated WYSIWYG editor
    • Documents can be restricted to groups defined by audiences, usernames, or directory queries
  • Create multiple events calendars and merge them into an organization-wide events calendar
  • Integrate authentication with LDAP server and/or other directory systems
    • Built-in integration with LDAP for authentication and identity management
    • Reason can use LDAP as authoritative source for identity information
    • Pluggable authentication and directory interface provides a simple way to programmatically integrate Reason with just about any identity store
  • Enjoy typing, printing, and emailing with nice URLs
    • Reason pages have nice URLs, like: www.yoursite.com/departments/hr/
    • Reason handles redirects automatically when a page is moved, reducing "page not found" errors and keeping links and bookmarks alive
  • Provide edit-in-place capabilities for many kinds of content
    • Content maintainers do not need to use the administrative interface to edit content
    • This feature also allows content maintainers to delegate maintenance to individuals who do not have access to the full set of administrative tools.
  • Use a WYSIWYG form editor to create and edit web forms
    • Enable content maintainers to easily build forms for their sites
    • Forms can email results or place them into a database
    • Forms have reliable server-side error checking
  • Extend Reason to meet organization-specific needs
    • Create custom modules to integrate with existing systems or to expand Reason's features
    • Modular, open-source framework puts control in your hands
    • Create new data types as needed
    • Reason auto-generates administrative interfaces for your custom data types, and you can customize those interfaces with a powerful administrative API.
    • Your custom data types are "full citizens" in Reason -- they automatically get all of Reason's built-in services such as borrowing/sharing, item history, caching, tidy, unicode, rss feeds, etc.