Friday, Apr 27, 2012    Text size: 

LOS ANGELES — Mansion Productions has announced that its MAS Version 2 content management system is entering the beta testing phase.

The company said V2 is a true major upgrade over the first version released in 2003 and is fully backwards-compatible, inheriting all features and customizations from previous smaller improvements.

The code has been completely re-written with security, productivity and maximum flexibility in mind and the product has added numerous new features including a new admin user interface.

MAS V 2’s workspace allows multiple windows and dialog boxes to be opened simultaneously, moved around, rolled up to a small title bar while the user looks at another window, or minimized to the taskbar which shows all active windows.

Template editing areas can be detached as separate windows with syntax highlighting and code hints, and feature multiple undo capability. “The ability to have multiple windows with different parts of the interface open is also something that makes the everyday experience with the system easier and faster, especially if one's working on a big monitor,” Mansion noted.

This version also introduces a new Background Execution Manager which handles all CPU, HDD, and MySQL-intensive processes like rebuilding pages, creating thumbs, creating zips and video extraction, and transcoding. These improvements speed administrator use and eliminates the potential security breach of having all content folders with open web-writeable 777 permissions — a common issue to most CMS products having to update multiple files on the server.

A visual Task Manager also lets the admin monitor/pause/kill the currently running processes, see and rearrange the list of queued processes, and check logs of completed processes.

Various improvements to content attributes, section templates, and gallery templates (tags, loops, inheritance, assignment, grouping and filtering), also improve productivity when using the system to create a network of similar looking sites. The upgrades help when redesigning existing sites by reducing the need to clone the content and simplifying the code in templates when different layouts are needed for members’ areas and free tour versions.

Other notable additions include built-in video transcoding and frames extraction module; preview images manager; comments, favorites, watermarks; cached search results; auto-suggest search box; dynamic, cached image resize-tool (in addition to statically built thumbnails and medium-res photos); and multiple templates per content set/per site.

The offering also provides auto-populated calendar of updates; advanced content rotation settings; new tags and advanced template structures; and built-in support for major CDN's and video streaming technologies.

More information about the new features can be found here.

Mansion said a full list of all current and upcoming features will be published when MAS V2 passes the beta testing phase and is officially released to the market.

For more information about MAS contact mas@mansionproductions.com or visit Membersareasystem.com and submit a contact form.