everchanging Presence has been rewritten from scratch for Mac OS X. In version 2.0, the product becomes a “new Mac OS X Web publishing system,” according to John Anderson of everchanging.
You create the HTML used to layout your pages, then you use that layout to create as many pages as you’d like. Because the actual HTML is generated on-the-fly, you never have to worry about things like style consistency and link management — Presence takes care of all of that for you, Anderson said.
“Need to change a specific element across your entire site?” he said. “No problem. And when you move a page or even a folder, Presence is smart enough to fix all of your links for you.”
Presence is also a multi-user network application. It features custody control features to ensure that only one person is working on an individual page. Automatic version tracking and unlimited persistent page history mean that you can see every state that every page has been in since its inception. The server can even run on headless machines such as Apple’s new Xserve. And content can be routed through an administrator or manager for approval before it gets posted.
“Presence is a godsend for any Web guru who spends their day funneling other people’s content into a standard look-and-feel,” he added. “This software allows you to set up some templates and say, ‘Here, you do it.’ And even if you don’t have a team of copy writers to deal with, Presence removes a lot of the tedium involved in site design.”
Due to its modular architecture, Presence is completely customizable. All of the user interface for specifying page options and entering page content comes from the seven included plug-ins. Third-parties can develop more plug-ins to customize the kinds of content that Presence can handle. In addition, administrators can write scripts and include them in their templates.
Presence is available for download from the everchanging Web site. The price is US$68 per user.