Site Builder Wizard

[gorilla]

guess its specifically build for plesk

 

[rs-freddo]

Found the perfect solution! For me at least....

CityDesk is free, up to 50 files
It's run on the clients Windows machine.
It's a Windows program with very familiar layout.
It's easy to build templates for, ones that advertise my hosting.
Client can easily edit templates.
Clients's not stuck with one company for templates, any web designer can easily build a template. I can build a template from any web design.
STATIC WEB PAGES !!!! Yeee Haah! less load on my server = more hosting clients

The only disadvantage is that anybody can host the pages. But I don't see that as a big problem as I'll be isuuing template packages ONLY available to people hosting with me. Also promoting the brand works for me, as it promotes my FREE templates with hosting account....

http://www.fogcreek.com/CityDesk/

 

[electric]

I purchased sw-soft's SiteBuilder and had problems installing it... I tried to email them several times as the general publishing version was supposed to work with CPanel. I have yet to receive any response. The forum for SiteBuilder is no help and hardly has any posts. I even tried to pay the tech support for my server and they couldn't seem to get it either. It looks good but so far I've had no luck or support with it.

I think it's still pretty new and they're working on the bugs for "other" (non plesk) systems.

 

[MediaServe]

The only issue we ran into when installing the Plesk SiteBuilder on cPanel is that you have to move the /usr/local/apache/conf.d/sitebuilder.conf into /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf to properly resolve the sitebuilder domain.

 

[anup123]

Psoft is ok, but pray your clients do not use any part that requires smtp mailling. Psoft's S.S. only allows for one serverwide smtp server configuration so ALL mail from any domain would be sent from the one configured smtp server. This is one of the major drawbacks with S.S. with cPanel.

Just took SS1.6 a week back and in a two or three weeks they are releasing V1.7 which would have the "From" part corrected to include the Real Senders email address as otherwise it was just the site admin email address till now from pages like Contact Page.

Additionally, there are going to be some new features and templates as well. So far no complaints ... good support response times. Using as Standalone installation.

Anup

 

[anup123]

Just got hold of the lates release of SiteStudio (psoft.net). Two stunning new features are:

Photo Player Flash
Slideshow Flash

Additionally 9 new templates

Not a bad deal for 150$ for a 100 user license.

Anup

 

[gorilla]

Hi Anup,
did you have to modify the install for SS a lot in order to make it work on your cPanel server ?

 

[anup123]

Hi.

Nope, just followed the instructions in the docs.
Just had to have that database under a user account though docs mention databases attached to no user account. Just did this change so that the db is backed up automatically ... just in case restore is needed (god forbid).

Their support has been pretty good at least that's the experience of last three weeks dealing with them (though had a long drawn email exchanges on thr trial version).

Thanks
Anup

 

[gorilla]

Hmm, might need to have a closer look at that then, thanks for sharing your experience

 

[wptechno]

Sitestudio

Yes, sitestudio is what I've been using for about 1 year now with cpanel (standalone). At first there were a lot of small little setbacks but it's really come along way with their new versions. My clients and potential clients love the program and I don't have to worry much about customer service as it is very easy for them to just point and click and figure it out themselves. When I do have to work with customers it's a snap to show them how it works. It really is pretty fun. With Psoft Technical support, just make sure you use their ticket system and they get back in a reasonable time.

 

[anup123]

To say the least i am impressed with their response times and they do not put any restrictions on how many support tickets you can post. They are pretty fast on responding to bugs.

Anup

 

[gorilla]

You need to run java servlets for sitestudio , dont you ?

 

[wptechno]

yes

yes. tomcat. I'm glad I did install java servlet though, because once I installed it, it opened up a whole new world of java programs that now my server can run that wasn't able to before.

 

[anup123]

Yes but it's self contained (requuring java1.4). You do not need to install cpanel's tomcat or anything. It uses Tomcat 4.1

There are some issues wrt their present image cacheing strategy which kicks up the server load if you have large number of images in "Our gallery" section (i uploaded some 3000 images --- more than about 120MB) for load testing on start of SiteStudio and the load kicks up (though not severe). They have promised to rework/improve on the image cacheing strategy which they have at present in rc2 perhaps. But these are just tests from Admin POV before releasing it to end users... they admit no one did come back to them with this issue so far.

Anup