These are notes of the prepared presentation for ShadoCMS on its website.

Installing ShadoCMS. Same process on any platform. First step is to install CFMX 7, which actually is included in the price of ShadoCMS. Next, create a database (Oracle, MSSQL, or MySQL) and the DSN. Finally, deploy the site by dragging the software into your site’s web root. You can either begin building your site or use a template to start as a jumping point for your site.

Editing some content. Like many CMS packages, displays editable regions with a colored border around them. When clicking “Edit”, will open that region and can edit the content. Has a very typical WYSIWYG editor.

Site Management. Pages are clearly visible with a site tree that is collapsible by clicking on containers. From this view, you can view past history of a page and roll back to previous versions if desired. Easy to cut/paste pages in and out of various sections of the site, and your navigation can be automatically controlled by this to make it easy to be updated. Very nice.

Adding new pages and new content objects inside those pages is very simple. A click to create a new container, and the new object in a page is created.

Application framework. Shado provides an object-oriented framework for developers. Has a comprehensive, documented API for developers. Because of this exposure to the API, it is simple to modify the objects in Shado. In the demo, he took a user object and added a new field, which then showed up in the user manager form. Nice.

User Mgmt. Built to integrate with an LDAP directory.  Can control what pages users can see, etc. Users belong to groups and permissions are assigned to their groups.

Modules. Additional modules can be built and deployed on the site. News/Events mgmt, form builder, Microsoft Word Import Engine, SEO, etc.  Custom modules can be written by Shado or even by customer.

Search. Verity K2 is used, and excellent Google-esque searching is thus supported.

I haven’t used the CMS in a hands-on fashion yet, but it does indeed seem like a very solid CMS.