Templates & Tokens: Nearly every portion of Content General that a web visitor will see is able to be designed by way of templates and tokens. This gives the web designer full range of laying out a page the way they would like.
Templates are the overall layouts for each instance of Content General while tokens are the specific elements of content that can be placed within those templates.
Items Based Content: Content is broken into a series of items that can be modified independently of their layouts. Allowing the content editor to freely add or modify content without worry of breaking design styles or layout.
Categories: Every item can be assigned to one or more categories. Categories are the means by which content general separates or combines content throughout your website portal. Categories are even capable of spanning across multiple portals.
Extended Content: Each item in Content General is displayed in a list by category but there is often a need to isolate a single item and show more content. This can be done a couple ways but the most powerful way is to use the [READMORE:xx] token pointing to a specific DNN TABID. By doing so the content where the multiple items are displayed will be replaced with a single item. This method allows for you to continue to add any number of other modules to the page and view them along with the extended content.
Published & Drafts: All items are capable of being put into a Draft mode by which you can modify and work on the content of that item while it will not be viewable by your website’s visitors.
Time Sensitive: All items have two date stamps, start date & end date. By assigning a start date in the future this allows you to create an item in advance but not have it show up on the site till the current date is passed the start date. Likewise the end date allows you to remove content from your website visitors once the current date is passed the end date.
Comments:When adding the comments token to the item layout you will be granted the ability for each item to have the ability for your website visitors to make comments. Comments can also be displayed directly on the page or on a subsequent page by use of the templates. (See Extended Content)
RSS: Every instance of Content General has a syndication feed available that can be used by 3rd party modules or given to your visitors for their feed readers.
File Attachments: The need to attach files to articles is very common. So Content General allows for attaching multiple files to every item and give custom titles to each item. A file icon is also available that represents the specific type of file that was uploaded.
Image Gallery: Content General features on-the-fly resizing. All images in the image gallery are capable of having sizes set for a thumbnail and full size view. These images are run through an image resize which will scale down the size of the image so your visitors won’t be downloading over sized files.
Some options for the image resizing are the ability to add Anti-Alias during the resizing process to make extremely large images look smooth when scaling down to a thumbnail friendly size.
Caching: The image resizing process can be a memory taxing on a web server if done every time. So what Content General has done is every image that is processed and resized is then cached on the file system for future use. Modifying the thumbnail or full size widths in administration will clear the cache.
Lightbox: Lightbox is a modal/isolated view of that image. Each image thumbnail available when browsing the images will be clickable to invoke a Lightbox effect displaying a larger version of that image.
Video: Content General features a flash based video player. Content General uses Flowplayer for its method of displaying flashed based video. While not all the features of Flowplayer have yet been implemented into Content General, you find many of them coming in future versions.