PRES 1.9.7 review

PRES project (the Press Release System) is a simple content management system, essentially targeted at producing a news and informati

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Simon Brooke

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PRES project (the Press Release System) is a simple content management system, essentially targeted at producing a news and information site. Managing a PRES system is designed to be simple.

However, presentation is sophisticated and flexible. An elementary knowledge of IT would be useful but expertise in designing and managing websites is not a requirement. PRES can be used for anything from private 'blogging' to corporate news systems.

Here are some key features of "PRES":
Flexible Presentation
All content is generated as XML which is styled at server side with XSL-T stylesheets to provide the final look and feel of your pages. This permits an almost infinite variety of presentations. Furthermore, different XSL-T transforms can be associated with different 'categories', allowing you to have different styling for different parts of your site.

Caching
Content is generated on request, but in order to limit the computational load on busy sites all content is cached for a limited period (by default twenty minutes).

Subscription
PRES allows users to 'subscribe' to 'categories' - effectively sections of the site. When new stories are posted to a section you're subscribed to, you will automatically get email with a link to the story.

Syndication
PRES makes its headlines available as a syndication feed, using both RSS 0.91 and RSS 1.0. This allows other news sites to automatically incorporate live headlines from a PRES site into their content.

Threaded Discussion
PRES optionally allows registered users to add comments to stories in a threaded manner, similar to sites like Slashdot.

Moderation
PRES optionally allows registered users to 'moderate' other users' comments.

Requirements:
PRES is delivered as a Java WebApp - that is, a collection of Java, XML and HTML resources intended to be served from inside a Servlet 2.3 specification Servlet Container, such as Tomcat 5 (indeed, although PRES should work with any compliant servlet container, the ones we test against and recommend are Tomcat versions 4 or 5).
It needs to have access to a relational database engine, and the only one which is really supported is Postgres 7. We know people who use PRES with MS SQL Server and with Oracle, and we're sure many other databases are possible; but we use, support and recommend Postgres.
For automatic thumbnailing of images to work on UN*X-like platforms, you should use a Java Development Kit later than 1.4.2 and the script which starts the Servlet container should pass the parameters

-Djava.awt.headless=true -Xmx128M -server

to the Java Virtual Machine (you will probably find this is the default). If you cannot do this, automatic thumbnails of uploaded pictures will not work.