Bitweaver Overview

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Bitweaver is an open source content management system. Its speed and power are ideal for large-scale community websites and corporate applications, but it simple enough for non-technical small site users to set up and administrate. You have probably heard such claims before, so what makes bitweaver special? Let us tell you...

Fully Featured On Install

Out of the box bitweaver comes with a full set of features you want in a CMS, such as: Articles, Wiki Pages, Blogs, Categories, Image Galleries, Calendar, User Management, Choice of Database, Languages, Theming, Comments, etc, etc.

Use Only What You Need

Bitweaver is completely modular. Just because bitweaver has a lot of features doesn't mean you have to use them all. Install the modules you need, and turn off those you don't. It's easy to add any features that the bitweaver developer community may come up with, such as the Google Maps Package.

This extensibility is great for site admins who want to be able to set up a robust site and customize it to their needs without having to do any technical work. And when you want to add on your own custom features, bitweaver is ready for you.

Easy To Extend

Bitweaver is designed to be as customisable and easy to build upon as possible. The bitweaver application framework offers a robust set of core services, via its APIs, that you can utilize in custom features you write. Using our APIs your application can tap into the bitweaver core to easily inherit comments, permissions, ratings, categorization, etc. We take care these things so you can focus on building the custom features you need.

Our framework also makes it easy to hook existing applications into the bitweaver core, things like phpBB, which we provide with the current install.

Bitweaver is completely modular, open source, object oriented, and written in PHP. We use Smarty Templates and ADOdb to support many databases.

What Can You Build With Bitweaver?

Single and Multi-user Blogs
Photo Galleries and Media Centers
Community and Group Sites
Corporate Applications

See A Variety of Sites Running Bitweaver

The Best of Bitweaver

Here are the highlights of what makes bitweaver special:

Extremely Simple Theming

Our granular theming system easily lets you hand-pick just the piece of the UI you would like to modify. Look and feel are extremely easy to customize and can be designed to replicate any corporate theme.

A Smarty Template System
The powerful Smarty template system allows us to strictly separate logic from content. Smarty templates are basically HTML code, which makes them easy to learn and modify. This simplifies customization of the visual aspects of your system without the need to learn the guts of the system.

XHTML 1.0 Strict Compliance
Virtually all bitweaver template pages have been checked for XHTML 1.0 Strict compliance. We don't commit until all errors and warnings have been dealt with. We must admit, this is a lot of work, but our templates are now easy to read and work with. Our page load times remain short because we strip all our templates of excess white space.

See Our Theme Tutorial

Powerful Yet Simple CSS Styling

Unlike other CMSs we actually use a well organized nested class system, which provides immense freedom when it comes to CSS-based styling.

Our sophisticated CSS class selectors make styling easy, flexible, and incredibly powerful. Customization becomes easier because there is less to code. As a result, our CSS files are about 10-15 kb compared to the the overwhelming 50-65 kb in other CMS systems.

We have made it one of our aims to avoid tables where possible, thus we use tables only where browser compatibility issues make it absolutely necessary, or where appropriate elsewhere, such as data listings. However, even some of these use unordered lists to gain styling freedom using CSS.

See Our Basic CSS Schema

Easy Installation

Our advanced installer really rocks! It checks your PHP settings, informs you of the pertinent settings, and allows you to select which bitweaver packages you want to install. We even provide a graphical interface when upgrading your system or when converting from another CMS to bitweaver.

See Screenshots of Our Installer

Intuitive Admin Interface

Despite the great configurability of bitweaver, you will always know where to click since our admin includes inline help where appropriate.

Speed, Speed, and More Speed!

Our schema and queries are optimized for speed to be scalable to millions of pages. We noticed other CMS's don't utilize the most efficient queries with scalability in mind - but it has been one of our objectives from day one. There are several massive-traffic sites running bitweaver, and this forces us to be stingy with queries and diligent about JOINS. We are constantly rooting out ways to reduce our query counts. When we started, an average pageload took 200 queries; we are now down to ~25 for a basic page load.

Choice of Database

We support PostgreSQL (pgsql), Firebird/InterBase, Oracle, MySQL , Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase, and SQLite. We are one of the few CMSs that runs on all these databases. This leaves the choice open to the administrator to install on their favorite database backend. We also support Apache and IIS web server installs.

Bitweaver uses the ADOdb database abstraction library to connect to these databases.

Content Inheritance

Our Liberty Package means all content is stored in a central table, but allows for "derived tables" to handle each content type's unique needs.

Easy Integration With Other Applications

We currently have a number of third-party applications integrated into the bitweaver framework, such as phpBB and Gallery2. For example, if you are slaving users to another database, just create "function override_user_login" and you can do whatever magic you need to do to access your existing users database.

Pretty URLs - Your Way!

Declare "function override_user_login" to make custom user home page URLs

(NOTE: these last two might be a little too technically specific? Or not?)

Rapid Developement

Bitweaver receives continuous developement support from an active and dedicated community. There is fast-moving progress and development in every aspect of the framework.