Quixpo™ is a web application for maintaining any dynamic, database driven website. It's essentially a 'CMS' or 'Content Management System'. Quixpo can be used for blogging, but where it really shines is updating an online product catalogue or a photo gallery with a shopping cart or a wishlist ('lightbox').
News, pages and assets
Quixpo is everything you need to get your message out there. Update several news sections (or 'blogs') on your website or create a new page with as much as a simple mouse click. But this is only the beginning...
Where Quixpo excels, is when you want to build an online catalogue of your products. Quixpo can do things no other system can! You can sell, display, sort and catalogue anything: photographs, furniture, houses, t-shirts, etc... Add one or multiple pictures to an asset (e.g. details of an luxurious chair), along with a listing of available colors, options and extras. You can define your parameters to your liking such as ‘description’, ‘place’, ‘date’, ‘keywords’. Add as many custom fields as you wish!
If you are a photographer looking for the ideal way to sell your pictures online: look no further! When adding a photo to your online catalog, Quixpo automatically creates the necessary thumbnails and medium sized versions — with or without a small (or huge) watermark burned into them. You can add pictures one-by-one or many of them in a batch. Upload hundreds of photos to your web server via FTP – they will automatically appear in Quixpo, ready to be processed! Quixpo understands EXIF-information and can insert it automatically in the database.
"Habla French?"
Everything in Quixpo has been designed for maintaining a site in multiple languages. It couldn't be easier for you and your visitors: when you select a language on your website, everything (menu, news, pages, etc..) are translated in the blink of an eye.
Selling stuff online: couldn't be easier!
Quixpo was primarily designed to maintain an online store (e-commerce). Clients can browse the catalogue on your website and put the products they like in their shopping basket or their wishlist (or 'lightbox'). You can have customers pay online on your website. Quixpo is compatible with all major online payment gateways, such as Google Checkout, PayPal, VISA or Mastercard. But online payment is not required. Maybe you just want your clients to receive a preliminary invoice before they buy? Or maybe you do not use fixed prices for your products?
Quixpo returns a list of all the orders made on your website. Invoice data can be automatically generated, using the details your clients provided about themselves. Quixpo doesn't lock your collected data. You can export information about your clients and the orders they made in all kinds of formats like XML or CSV. This data can then be easily imported in applications such as Excel or a database for further processing.
You are in control
Visitors can comment on any news item or page. What's even more exciting is that they can rate your products (using the familiar stars) or comment on the benefits/drawbacks of them. In any case, you'll always be in control. Quixpo warns you when new comments are added to your web page. You can approve, edit or delete them straight away. And yes, there is an excellent built in protection against comment spam, so you will never have to worry about that.
Quixpo tracks valuable information about visitors to your site. You'll get daily statistics about the number of visitors, the browsers and operating systems they are using and the websites or search engines they came from (referers). No bloat: just useful information, to help you better serve your clients. All searches performed on your website are combined in a useful 'top searches' list. You'll definitely know what your clients are looking for.
Team up
Running a large e-commerce website requires multiple people to be working on the same site. Adding information about a few thousand products is a daunting job. As a super-administrator in Quixpo, you can give other people access to the system by creating accounts for them with limited capabilities. You can for example let them add products to the catalogue, but not delete or edit products they did not create. Maybe you want to grant access to someone who will be responsible for adding information to the news section? It's all possible!
Quixpo is definitely a multi-user content management system. It will even protect data to be overwritten when two people are working on the same content using an intelligent versioning system.
Templating with a smile
You can get any — any — layout into Quixpo. There are no limits. Build your own layout from the ground up using CSS and XHTML or start off with one of the standard layouts. Quixpo gives 'life' to any kind of design.
Quixpo uses the power of Smarty™ for its templating system, yet with a friendly interface. You can define 'replacers' in your templates, set some variables and have them extract any kind of information out of your database, in any kind of format or style. You have to see it to believe it.
Feature overview
Check out a detailed overview of features as you would find in a standard installation of Quixpo.The system is expandable: new plugins can be written to meet your specific needs.
Security, standards and speed
Quixpo is the invisible engine of a website (the ‘backend’). The only people who actually get to see it, are the administrators who add photos, pages and news, track orders or manage clients. It all comes together seamlessly on screen when someone visits your site.
Quixpo was completely written in PHP. It uses a MySQL database with utf-8 support (for weird characters) and runs on an Apache server, which is still the standard on the web. We are dedicated to UNIX based operating systems such as Linux. We are in love with Mac OS X and like open standards.
Quixpo uses advanced caching mechanisms to speed up web performance. Whether you publish 1,000 photos or 10,000: your website will always be the fastest around (except for the other Quixpo's out there of course).
See for yourself!
Vildaphoto.net, the online portfolio of Rollin Verlinde and Yves Adams, is the first professional site to use Quixpo™ as a complete Content Management System.
What to sell or show?
Assets can be any type of products (T-shirts, furniture, houses,...) but also just photographs. You can add assets to your online catalogue one-by-one or in batch using FTP. Before you start you have to define the kind of data you wish to enter for every asset type: you'll want to provide your customers with information about the size of the product, the available colors, a description, etc... there are no limits here. You can add as many searchable data-fields as you wish.
When adding an asset to your catalogue, you have to assign them to one or more 'categories'. Other online galleries often work with fixed ‘albums’. This is not always the most convenient way to catalog your stock. Using Quixpo, a photo can belong to several categories. A picture of a child playing with a dog for instance can be stored under ‘mammals’, ‘pets’, ‘child’ and ‘humor’. While browsing through these categories, your clients won’t miss the picture they are looking for.
