When I visited "J and Beyond" in Wiesbaden earlier this month, I met Emmanuel Danan. He's a French developer and the inventor of FLEXIContent and FLEXIAccess.
In this video, Emmanuel talks about how FLEXIContent and FLEXIAccess came to be.
FLEXIContent is a content management system that ties into the content database in Joomla.
FLEXIContent extends the functionality of the Article Manager and makes it easier to create custom content types, with templates and custom fields. FLEXIAccess is a fully integrated granular ACL solution. It allows to create specific user groups and permissions to set precisely WHO is allowed to WHAT and WHERE on your website.
About FLEXIContent
This is how Emmanuel describes FLEXIContent on his website:
FLEXIcontent is primarily an advanced content management system developed to replace the native article manager of Joomla! 1.5It adds the professional features required to build a collaborative web publishing system.
Even if it’s not its primary purpose, it can also manage records by presenting them the way of a directory.Thus, FLEXIcontent was designed to manage content in a broad sense, and can organise articles, image galleries or a video galleries, job offers, product catalogues, business directories, a.s.o. within a single user interface.
This means for the end user, unparalleled simplicity of use, everything happens in one place. Mastering 10 components to be able to administrate an entire website isn’t required anymore.
For the web designer it means also the end of the headaches for the maintenance and updates of all installed extensions.FLEXIcontent is an extension for Joomla! developed in 1.5 native mode and complying with the naming and coding conventions of the Framework (MVC frontend and backend). Thus, its portability to future versions will be greatly facilitated.
Impressive software
I enjoyed meeting Emmmanuel, and had the opportunity to sit down with him for a nice German beer at the airport after the conference. He gave me a tour of FLEXIContent and FLEXIAccess, and I must say I'm impressed with the solution he's created.
What's nice about FLEXIContent is that it uses the content database of Joomla. This means you can uninstall the component and still retain your data.
I have later tested both extensions and find it very smooth to work with. After playing with it, it's comes as no surprise to me that FLEXIContent won the Joomla Innovation of the Year 2010 in the J!Oscars at "J and Beyond".
The only thing lacking from FLEXIContent as I see it now is front-end editing. But, according to Emmanuel, this is under development. I'm really looking forward to that, as many customers prefer editing their content from the front-end.
Hear Emmanuel Danan speak about why he developed FLEXIContent:
I will write more about FLEXIContent and FLEXIAccess as I get to know the products better.