FireWeb – Firebird-based CMS for new www.ib-aid.com

Dmitry Kuzmenko, 20-May-2014
As you may noticed, our web-site www.ib-aid.com (www.ibsurgeon.com) has got a new look recently. This new web-site is running CMS FireWeb which uses Firebird 2.5.2 as a backend, so we decided to tell you more about its capabilities.

CMS FireWeb is developed and maintained by DQTeam (http://dqteam.com/), software development company, which is well-known by FirebirdSQL.org web-site and browser strategy Delta Quadrant: Horizons (http://www.dqhorizons.com/).

FireWeb architecture

Figure 1. FireWeb Architecture

Frontend of FireWeb is represented by Nginx – very fast and reliable caching web server. Nginx consumes less resources than traditional Apache and easier to install and configure.

Nginx combines static pages and dynamic content, provided by PHP framework, which runs SQL queries to Firebird database. PHP framework uses an intellectual caching mechanism of Redis to store SQL query results - it provides significant increase for reading queries.

FireWeb intensively uses many specific Firebird SQL database features – read-only transactions for page views, stored procedures and triggers for business logic. Redis DB is used also for view counters, which are synchronized in the background with main Firebird database.

FireWeb is designed to run on most popular Linux distributives: Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, etc.

Our (www.ib-aid.com) FireWeb instance is running on dedicated virtual machine with 1Gb RAM, and provides very good response time.

User interface

FireWeb has an easy intuitive interface with all necessary things for our web-site: static pages, web-forms to gather users’ data and send them to email, multilingual support, dynamic engine to maintain news and articles.

After login the main menu of FireWeb is shown:

Figure 2. FireWeb main menu

Main menu has the following options:

• Static pages
• News and articles manager
• Constants
• Banners
• Users manager
• Language manager

Let’s quickly review these features.

Static pages

"Static pages" section is a tree of all pages of our web site, it represents all contents of the site. Such organization gives a straightforward and easy way to create and modify web-site content

Figure 3. Static pages in FireWeb

To create new product or service page we need to select “parent” page and click “+” - page dialog will appear:

Figure 4. Page editor in FireWeb

Page editor provides a lot of tools and capabilities to create web-pages with rich content.

At the top of the page editor you can see drop-down list of languages – by selecting the specific language we can create or edit an appropriate language version of the page – English, Russian, Portuguese, etc.

Also it is possible to create custom page address – it is important for search engines optimization.

News and Articles Manager

The next menu point is a manager for News and Articles. News and Articles are dynamic elements, to be presented on the main page and in Articles section.

Figure 5. News Manager in FireWeb

Constants

In this section of admin panel users can set values to many parameters of the web-site.

Figure 6. Constants

User groups

FireWeb provides enhanced security options for simultaneous data editing. It is possible to setup separate groups and users – some can create materials, some can edit them and approve, etc.

Figure 7. User groups in FireWeb

Multilingual support

FireWeb supports many languages – to enable new language we need to create new record in Languages section of admin menu, and then create/edit web-pages for particular languages. It is also possible to copy existing content from one language version to another to simplify translation.

Figure 8. Multi-language support in FireWeb

Summary

FireWeb is a reliable and fast CMS with an easy and intuitive administration interface, and powerful content options. It is a very good choice for web-site: Firebird is an excellent backend, nginx and Redis are fast web components for content caching, and all together they work in secure and fast manner.

If you are interested in FireWeb, please feel free to ask any questions: [email protected].