We’ve completed the Robintek CMS 3.0! Over the past year, Robintek has been working extremely hard to enhance our products to meet and exceed the needs of our customers. The enhanced Robintek CMS 3.0 features a fresh new look, additional administrative privileges and most importantly, a friendlier user interface.

The fresh new look starts with the administrative panel. You may be wondering why a more appealing administrative panel might matter? The difference is simple. We wanted to create an administrative panel with more distinguishable characteristics to help the end user maneuver through features and functionality quickly and effectively. The administrative panel hosts a variety of news colors and icons that are used to indicate different options available within the system. These colors and icons help the user quickly recognize and implement changes to their website. Another feature implemented on the Administration panel is a User Activity bar. The importance of this new feature is that it will show what changes have recently been made to the site, where those changes were made, and who made these changes to the website. Tracking the changes made to the website can not only help with accountability, but also help with managing the changes to the content of the site without ever having to worry about whether or not a particular change was made. The “User Activity Bar” also allows the user to also jump directly into a previously edited item.

The look and feel was not the only thing that we changed in regard to the administration panel. We also wanted to focus on making the user experience with the content editor clear and more manageable. The content editor is where you are able to control certain content that your visitors will see when arriving on any page of your website. The new CMS 3.0 contains a new updated WYSIWYG. This WYSIWYG makes it easier to format the content the way it is intended. It features a variety of buttons including; undo, redo, bold, italics, underline, strike-through, subscripts, superscripts, font sizing, font color, highlighter, add and remove hyperlinks, text alignment, and even inserting tables and media without issue. Working with the new WYSIWYG is a great addition and it will be particularly familiar to users because it is very similar to working in Microsoft programs like Word and EXCEL. Another new feature is the addition of a spell check button. The spell check works similar to any spell check in a word processor, but also gives the added capability to add a particular word to your dictionary with just one click. This makes the spell check feature customizable to recognize words used regularly that may be specific to a business.

When creating the new CMS, we found that user management was very important. Many of our customers wanted the ability to give others in their company the ability to make changes to the website, but wanted to maintain accountability for what changes were made by whom. The new user management feature allows an administrator to create multiple user accounts with permissions to access the website and make changes, rather than giving out the same log-in credentials for all users. With this feature, we’ve also added another layer of administrative functionality to control user permissions. For example, if a manager wanted to be the only person with access to reports on the website, they could easily set the “role” of other users to not have permission to view reports.

Finally, to add to the user friendly interface, we changed the layout of our grids that hold all of the content within the website. This benefits the user because it made our newest “preview” feature possible. The preview feature is indicated by a magnifying glass on any page or story created for the website. By selecting the magnifying glass, the user can view some content, without having to open a new window or the page on the website. This helps to streamline the editing process for the user to quickly view the content and find where to make the necessary changes.

These changes were implemented for 1 reason, the customer. We want to provide a level of service that they will not just hear about, but they will see in the enhancements and updates that we are continuously striving to achieve to create a better product for them. We hope that the customer will continue to speak because we will continue to listen.