Existing Pronto customers often ask us what benefits are on offer thanks to the Avenue CMS. Australian made and developed by the Melbourne based web development Pronto Woven team, there are many advantages for existing Pronto customers when they switch over to Avenue.
To explain more about our CMS, Avenue implementations consist of two code bases. As far as the back-end goes, it is written by Ruby on Rails and consists of most of the customisations and core features of Avenue. It’s important to note that the back-end is not customisable. When we look at the front-end and our CMS, it is written in Liquid Syntax which is essentially HTML code but with special keywords that allow pages to access information about certain Avenue objects. The CMS can also integrate Javascript and CSS, enabling special functions and formatting.
Our Avenue Admin screen contains several text editors that allow clients to edit the appearance of key areas of your site such as its product pages, blog posts, email templates, search results and more. The CMS contains what we call special ‘template’ pages, which are dedicated to displaying a specific type of object, including a product, a past order or a blog post. Each object is provided in the form of what we refer to as ‘drops’ that detail general information about the object. This function can be used when rendering any page without exposing sensitive data or functions that modify the state of the actual object itself (in other words, you won’t be able to accidentally break your data simply by displaying it on the page). There are also ‘forms’ that can be used to submit information to Avenue - information such as log-in credentials as well as customer inquiries.
It’s important to realise that the Avenue CMS is edited independently of the main Ruby codebase. Any changes made to the CMS will take immediate effect and appear the next time the page in question is loaded. This is incredibly beneficial as it allows the client and our own developers to modify the site without having to schedule a full site update. It’s also ideal for making small changes and allows Avenue users to use their own front-end developers to change and maintain the CMS however they see fit.
The Woven team can develop your CMS for you, providing you with a starting point for customising the appearance of your website. As always, whenever we undertake projects such as this one, we’ll develop your CMS and make any necessary changes in a test environment, as opposed to making changes to a live site. Once you are satisfied with how the CMS is looking and operating, we’ll move the changes to the live environment using one bulk export. This export can either export the entire CMS, or just export one single page.
Given Pronto has been in the industry for over 40 years now, you can trust us as being in the web development industry for the long haul. We are based in Melbourne but we service clients Australia-wide.
Contact Woven today to discuss the extent of our CMS capabilities and how we can be of assistance to your business and its unique needs.
