Information Systems:ExSite CMS

This page will document the ExSite CMS used to run uniPHARM websites. An alternative document outlining common CMS tasks can be found here. 

Overview

The unipharm.com, medicinecentre.com, and umccharity.ca websites run on a Content Management System (CMS) platform called ExSite. As a CMS, ExSite is similar to the more popular Wordpress and Drupal, but is an in-house tool that was developed by ExWare, the company that hosts and manages uniPHARM's public-facing websites.

Administration

Sections of the CMS

Blogs

Formerly called eZines, Blogs is a plugin for RSS panels. On unipharm.com, Blogs is used to man

Permissions levels

With ExSite v4, content permissions (i.e. being able to see/access pages) are enforced using a 10-level "ladder". That is, each successive level has more authority than the last. unipharm.com uses 3 levels:

• public - Guests (no login required)
• users - Logged in users
• members Shareholders

Logically, the public-facing pages are set to public, privileged pages like Members Home on unipharm.com are set to users, and shareholder-specific pages like the Company Directory page are set to members.

Permissions can be set on other content besides pages, such as individual blog posts.

Technical Notes

• ExSite was built with the Perl programming language. It can be run on a typical AMP stack (Apache, MySQL, and this case, P(erl)).
• ExSite is open-source, but uniPHARM uses a forked version that includes mods and plugins i.e. Messages plugin, custom login routine etc.

Other Notes

• ExSite received a major upgrade from v3 to v4. In July 2019, unipharm.com was transitioned to ExSite 4.