We’ll be releasing an updated version of the portal software in the next few months. It can be used for many different uses. It comes with about 40 standard modules which can let you or your organization build and manage a site from a web interface. We currently use Rainbow Portal to manage our site and have started integrating third party software services that help us run our company. Here’s why we chose Rainbow as our base.
The Website is the Tip of the Icerberg
Open Source
This means that you can hire outside developers to develop extensions as you need them. If you click on the diagram to the right, you’ll see how other pieces of software available on the Internet can help you run your business in addition to Rainbow. We’re developing modules that work with third party software as a service vendors so that all your business operations show up on one Intranet. (Like Us)
Great Template Engine
They have one of the better template systems currently in use. This lets your web designer use his current skill set of HTML and CSS to build a look and feel for your site that can be applied to all your pages.
Extensability
Rainbow modules can be created by anyone who knows SQL Server and ASP.NET. Sometimes you may need to have specialized content structures and this extensability lets you do that easily.
Security
If you want to have a section of your site that is just for certain people, such as Clients or Employees, that can be taken care of using the built in security and permissions system.
A standard installation of Rainbow starts out with one Page and an Administration section. The setup is currently a little complicated, but its nothing that an experienced system administrator can’t figure out. Actually its’ not that hard, you just have to do the right things in order to get it up and running. I would suggest getting someone to help you do this if you are just a business person or an individual.
Pages
Rainbow Sites are made up of Pages which can have SubPages. Pages are like containers. They keep all your content in one of three panes. Although all pages share the default template, you can specify a different template for a special page.
Panes ( Left , Center, Right )
You have three panes where you can put just about anything. I think they are working on more, but not many sites need more panes than that. I know, I’ve built quite a lot of them. The panes don’t have to be positioned left to right and can be placed anywhere in any shape using CSS.
Modules
Each Page can have many modules in one of the aforementioned panes. There are many different modules that come packaged with Rainbow. We’ve made one called the Amazon Books Control. We’ll release a new version once we get our pending work done.
Once you’ve logged in, you can go to the Page Manager under Administration and start Adding pages. Once you’ve added a page, you can click “Edit This Page” and add modules of your choice on the pane of your choice.
There aren’t too many things you need to learn as an End User that manages content. Here are a few actions.
- Add A Page
- Move a Page
- Protect a Page
- Add Modules to a Page
- Move Modules on a page.
- Move Modules from Page to Page.
- Delete Modules
- Recover Deleted Modules
- Add Content to a Module
- Move Content from Module to Module.
Some Useful Modules The most useful module for a content site made in Rainbow would have to be the “HTML Document” module. After placing this module on your site, you can insert any HTML content that you would normally put on your site using outdated tools like DreamWeaver or FrontPage. I would say you should still use tools like that to do your layout, but for content edits, its just way too much overhead and inefficient.
Another very useful module is the Enhanced HTML Module. This module lets you publish multipage HTML documents in multiple languages. This is great if you are writing a multipage article that needs to be split into sections.
Some other modules that you can find on the system are Articles, Announcements, FAQs, and Events to name a few. Once you’ve been introduced to Rainbow it’s hard not to use it for your content needs. More to come on using on using Rainbow for Content Management.
Posted on April 3, 2010 by Rahul Singh
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