Escenic Content Engine is a high performance content management system for text, images, audio files, video clips and all the other digital assets that are used on modern websites.

Key features

Escenic Content Engine not only stores the content and provides delivery to multiple channels, but also provides the APIs and back-end functionality for applications such as Escenic Content Studio. Everything stored within the system is made accessible through Java Server Pages tag libraries, RESTful web services, an open Java API and powerful XML syndication features.

Enterprise content management

Escenic Content Engine is the core of an Vizrt online solution, both as a full-featured content repository and as a high performance content delivery system.

Escenic Content Engine handles all content types: text, images, video, graphics, maps, Flash content, PDF documents, MS Office documents to name but a few. Content modelling functionality allows customers to combine all types of content to create the complex content types required.

Multi-channel cross publishing is standard functionality in Escenic Content Engine. Work with the richest version of the content, and automatically adapt it to each website and channel. Escenic Content Engine can easily be scaled to manage tens or hundreds of websites, all efficiently managed with Escenic Content Studio.

Multi-channel and mobile ready

Escenic Content Engine is  designed for multi-channel content publishing from the core, providing efficient and instant publishing to multiple websites and channels directly from Escenic Content Studio. Any section of a website may be given its own URL or even its own domain name,and pages and sections may be given distinct and different designs and branding.

Escenic Content Engine can automatically adapted content to any mobile and handheld device. Automatic device detection of the around 10,000 mobile devices ensures that all users get the best user experience. Content is automatically adapted based on the device's capabilities, such as physical screen size and resolution, touchscreen and keyboard, supported image and video formats, CSS and HTML levels, JavaScript and AJAX support.

Full-featured content repository

Escenic Content Engine is the central repository for all web content, and content stored in other repositories may also be easily accessed: Videos from Viz Video Hub, graphics from Viz Content Pilot, maps from Viz Curious Maps, and similarly with other systems.

Escenic Content Engine supports all types of content, and complex content types are easily modelled in XML. Existing content types may be changed at any time, for instance by adding geographical data to videos or by adding graphics to images, without changing the database, or even restarting the server.

Content is available with JSP (XHTML, RSS, etc) , Java API, REST web services and XML import/export functionality.

Escenic Content Engine has built-in version control, and all changes are managed using standard Java Management Extensions ( JMX).

Two-way synchronization with other systems, and Escenic Content Engine's locking features allow external systems to temporarily lock content while it is being updated outside of Escenic Content Engine.

Search Engine Optimization

Escenic Widget Framework provides a ready-to-use, extensible, configurable presentation layer that delivers well-formed, validating XHTML with ESI support "out of the box".

Correct (X)HTML markup
Escenic Content Engine separates content and presentation: Content producers work in Escenic Content Studio, while the presentation of the content (on different websites, different channels) is handled by Escenic Content Engine.

The web pages (and RSS feeds, etc) are generated with JPS, giving the website's developers complete control over how the content is delivered:
 

• Escenic Content Studio: Full-featured editor for text, images, keyword tagging, geo-tagging, etc
  
• Escenic Content Engine: High performance presentation layer and content delivery

Escenic Content Studio provides a full-features text editor which produces validating XHTML, making it impossible to produce incorrect markup. The JSP presentation layer generates the content as it is served to the website's visitors. This means that Escenic Content Engine may produce web pages (or RSS feeds, etc) that conform with any standard (HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, etc), and that websites may adhere to strict accessability requirements such as Section 508 and WAI.

Escenic Widget Framework provides a ready-to-use, extensible, configurable presentation layer that delivers well-formed, validating XHTML with ESI support "out of the box".

Search-friendly URLs
URLs may be built exactly as the customer wishes, and all content stored in Escenic Content Engine may be used as part of the URL:
http://example.com/12345.ece
http://example.com/12345.html (or .jsp, .php, etc)
http://example.com/section/subsection/title-of-the-story-12345.ece
http://example.com/2010/01/01/title-of-the-story.html
etc

Some customer examples:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/picturegalleries/7263563/Romantic-Italian-hotels-four-of-the-best.html
http://www.reflector.com/news/pirates-kick-baseball-season-today-23950
http://www.welt.de/motor/article6464450/Bentley-baut-schnellsten-offenen-Viersitzer-der-Welt.html
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/fun/gizmo/2851515/PowerBlock-Reserve-for-Apple-iPhone-and-iPod.html
http://www.majalla.com/en/international_investor/article17490.ece
http://hd.se/sport/2010/02/15/tre-medaljer-till-spader-dam/

URLs may be built using title words, keyword tags or any other content stored in Escenic Content Engine. The content item's id is normally a part of the URL, but it is also possible to omit it, as in the last example.

URLs that use the story's title words may be updated automatically when the title is edited. Requests for the old URL will result in a HTTP 301 Permanent Redirect, and the story's meta header can then contains information about the canonical URL.

Websites migrated to Escenic Content Engine from a different system may preserve all the old URLs to maintain the Google PageRank. The old URLs may also be mapped to new URLs, and requests to the old URLs may be redirected with HTTP 301 as described above.

Escenic Content Engine 5.1 added a new API method, setRelativeURI(), which greatly simplifies the URL customization and allows customers to create practically any standard-compliant URL.

URLs such as hd.se URL above are standard in Escenic Content Engine 3.3-4. On Escenic Content Engine 4, this is not possible without an additional lookup table.

Linking
Escenic Content Engine has excellent support for cross-publishing between several websites and/or between several sections of the same website. Publishing to multiple websites is as easy as publishing to multiple sections, and it may also be automated based on rules. Each content item has it's "home" within a website, eliminating duplicate URLs. Content may be automatically linked to related content using keyword tags, automatically updated searches, etc.

Images
Images stored in Escenic Content Engine retain all metadata stored in IPTC and EXIF fields. This information can be used to automatically generate texts for the "alt" attribute of the <img> HTML tag. Images, as all other content types, may be tagged and the tags may also be used in the "alt" text, captions, etc.

Meta information
All content stored in Escenic Content Engine may be used to build the meta information of a page, in the same way as with URLs.
Escenic Content Engine has APIs supporting the use of third-party solutions for automatically enriching content with kaywords, synonyms, etc. This information can automatically be added to the page's meta information. Although "keyword stuffing" is technically possible, it is up to each customer to decide whether to use it.

Escenic Widget Framework features a SEO widget, which automatically adds keyword tags to the meta header information of pages.
Google Analytics, Chartbeat, Omniture, etc.

Escenic Content Engine supports Google Analytics, Chartbeat, Omniture, Oracle Real Real User Experience Insight and many other third-party solutions for measuring and tracking user activity on website.
Escenic Widget Framework features a Web Analytics widget for easily integrating with third-party analytics solutions, providing management from Escenic Content Studio.

ACAP
Although Escenic does not endorse ACAP, it has always been possible to use ACAP with Escenic Content Engine and some customers are using it.

Well-written content
This is by far the most important aspect of search engine optimization, and Escenic Content Studio and Escenic Content Engine does indeed support well-written content.

Escenic Content Engine Plug-ins

Escenic Content Engine is shipped with a number of plug-ins for extended functionality.

The following plug-ins are included in Escenic Content Engine:

Menu Editor

A tool for creating menus independently of the underlying content hierarchy and to provide multi-language menus.

Forum

Provides a framework for managing discussion forums, article comments and postings from external users.

Geo Code

Gives users of Escenic Content Studio the ability to tag all types of content with geographical location.

Poll

Let your audience participate by voting in surveys.

Lucy

A connector for the high performance, open source full-text search engine Lucene from Apache.

Section Feed

A configuration interface for setting up rules for automatic feeds of content between sections and/or websites.

Powerful presentation layer

Escenic Content Engine separates content and presentation, and uses Java Server Pages ( JSP) to present content on websites. This makes it possible to use the same content across multiple websites and channels, always providing the best presentation and user experience.

A full-features JSP tag library functions as an abstraction layer for website developers, allowing them to develop quickly without being burdened with having to deal with the underlying architecture such as database tables, cache management, etc. Most common website functionality can be implemented in minutes using a simple JSP tag.

By using the Escenic JSP tag libraries in combination with JavaServer Standard Tag Library ( JSTL), and also the Escenic Widget Framework, website developers can focus on the user experience, creating exciting websites quickly.

Open architecture

Escenic Content Engine is a content delivery system designed for high volume, high traffic content management, with focus on performance and stability.

Escenic Content Engine has a clean, well-documented architecture, designed as a platform for invention, integration and further development. The code is 100% Java, and content is accessible with JSP tag libraries, Java API, RESTful web services API and powerful XMLsyndication features.

RESTful API and Java

REST web services allows developers to use the Escenic platform with a wide variety of programming languages, including PHP and .NET. Content stored in Escenic Content Engine is available both in XML and Atom-based formats.

Escenic Content Studio may also be extended, and there is a separate guide documenting how to write plug-ins for creating additional functionality.

Escenic Technet contains more than 10 guides with extensive developer documentation, from how to set up syndication feeds to the Java bean reference. The Java API is documented with standard Javadoc.

Extremely scalable and robust architecture

High performance has always been a core feature of Escenic Content Engine, and the system is utilizing very efficient multi-level caching technology, making sure that both end users experience a fast website  and that Escenic Content Studio users can work with content in a very responsive application with no delays.

Open source solutions are commonly used in an Escenic Content Engine installation, for instance the Varnishhigh-performance HTTP accelerator and the Memcached high-performance, distributed memory object caching system.

Escenic Content Engine offers near-linear scaling, and installations range from single-server installations to advanced, distributed multi-server setups with internal and external load-balancing, redundancy, distributed database clusters, and content delivery networks.