More than just pages

Most website engines are little more than content management systems. What that means is that hold or manage the pages on the site for you enabling you to keep a site up-to-date, but what they usually don't do is provide any functionality other than page-management. The site structure, page-layout and design is probably fixed by the designers/programmers and so very hard to change or update.

Keeping pages linked in the most useful ways can be impossible as they use 'tree-structures' that users get lost in without the really useful cross-linking that makes websites so useful. Or if they do have cross-linking you end up in a mess of link-spaghetti after one or two site upgrades.

What Notanant provides is a community view of websites, both as communities of users and websites as communities of shared spaces. Websites should be functional, living things that change and adapt as the users need. Notanant links things because they need to be linked, not because they are just pages, producing deep, rich, user-friendly and mighty powerful community sites.

Take a simple example. Notanant has calendars and events because that's what communities need. The calendar on the page keeps up-to-date with the events on the system. Users can add dates and events (with suitable permissions) - it could be meetings, fixtures, holidays, birthdays or any other events or dates that are useful to other users or visitors. But we don't stop here. Users can register themselves for any event to say they want to attend or not. And if the event changes or is cancelled these users are automatically notified of the change.

Or a second example. Some areas of a site will be for News. In Notanant you mark information as news and Notanant understands what type of information this is. You can bring news through to the front page with a simple %%-tag. Users can register for alerts, so when a new item of news is added it forms part of their newsletter automatically. Or you can feed the news to RSS-readers.

In Notanant, thinking of sites as communities is not the same as thinking as sites as pages. By thinking of uses we get something more useable.