YNOT – Software development company Mansion Productions is in upgrade mode. After issuing an open beta-test invitation for affiliate-management platform MPA3, the company has announced a major upgrade to its award-winning content-management product, MAS.

MAS version 2 represents a major upgrade, according to Mansion Chief Executive Officer Oystein Wright. While fully backwards-compatible and inheriting all features and customizations from previous versions, the V2 code has been completely re-written with security, productivity and maximum flexibility in mind. Numerous new features were added, and everything is wrapped in a brand-new admin interface for ease of access and use, Wright said.

The workspace looks more like a standard desktop application, allowing multiple windows and dialog boxes to be displayed at any time, moved around, rolled up into a small title bar while the user looks at another window, or minimized to the taskbar. Template editing areas can be detached as separate, maximizable windows with syntax highlighting and code hints, and the product offers multiple undo capability (often a lifesaver).

Version 2 introduces the completely new Background Execution Manager, handles all CPU-, hard-disk-drive- and MySQL-intensive processes like rebuilding pages, creating thumbnails, creating zipped archives, and video extraction and transcoding. Not only does the addition facilitate administrator interaction with the server, but it also eliminates potential security issues associated with open web-writeable 777 permissions. Open-writable folders are a common security risk with content-management products, Wright said. A visual Task Manager allows admins to monitor, pause or kill currently running process, see and rearrange the list of queued processes, and check logs of finished processes.

Improvements to the Content Attributes, Section templates and Gallery templates (tags, loops, inheritance, assignment, grouping and filtering) enhance productivity when using the system to create a network of similar-looking sites with common templates. They also come in handy when redesigning existing sites (reducing the need to clone the content sets) and simplify the code in templates when different layouts are needed for the members area and the free tour.

Other notable additions include:

• Built-in video transcoding and frames extraction module.
• Preview images manager.
• Comments, favorites and watermarks.
• Cached search results in an auto-suggest search box.
• Dynamic, cached images resize-tool (in addition to statically built thumbnails and medium-resolution photos).
• Multiple templates per content set and per site.
• Auto-populated calendar of updates.
• Advanced content rotation settings.
• New tags and advanced template structures.
• Built-in support for major content-delivery networks and video streaming technologies.

More information about features can be found here.

MAS version 2.0 has entered the private beta-testing phase, and Wright said he expects the product to be released later this year.

For more information about MAS, visit MembersAreaSystem.com or [email=mas@mansionproductions.com]email[/email] Mansion Productions’ support staff.