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.