Syncato is a micro content management system designed to extract the maximum potential from the content of your data. All data in Syncato is stored as XML within a native XML database and is searchable using XPath. This includes the ability to execute XPath via a URL from within your browser.
What this really means is that the limitations on how you use and reuse the content on your site is only determined by how you markup your data. For minimal reuse you can just use standard XHTML, but the real power of Syncato comes when you go beyond that and add additional markup to increase the meaning of your content. What you want to do is up to you. The more information you add to your data the more useful it will be to you and to others. For a better idea about what this means take a look at these posts by Kimbro Staken and Jon Udell.
Syncato was originally called a weblog system, but that label is too limiting and isn't really appropriate based on the ideas behind the system. Yes you can manage a weblog with Syncato, but it is much more then just a weblog system. It's an XML fragment management system that enables the creation and management of XML micro content. That micro content can represent weblog entries, comments about those entries or just about anything else that can be described as XML. Using the facilities of the system you're then free to combine those fragments together however you desire. And just as with your weblog entries, your XML fragments are available via XPath and HTTP.
While Syncato is a very new system and definitely immature, it already supports many of the common weblog functions, plus much more. Here's a list of some of the current features.
- XPath queries of database content via HTTP GET. Allows you to extract raw data from the database.
- XPath queries of HTML content after XSL processing. Allows you to extract fragments from the final HTML rendering of the site.
- Choice of file system or Berkeley DB XML database backends
- REST style HTTP API to manage content in the database.
- Post categories.
- Category RSS feeds
- Add posts to multiple categories.
- Support for RSS 1.0 and 2.0 syndication formats.
- XSL driven presentation.
- Database queries from within XSL to enable powerful document construction facilities.
- The ability to easily apply different stylesheets to the same content.
- Ability to embed XPath queries within your posts to extract content from the database to be included in the post.
- Caching of XSL and HTTP query results for fast performance.
- Support for sending weblog change notifications to sites such as weblogs.com, blo.gs and technorati.com.
- Ping notifications are sent in a separate thread to insure fast response when posting.
- Ability to build non-weblog pages with the content from the database. (this page is an example)
- Easily add Google AdSense and Amazon associates ads to your pages.
- Comments on posts.
- Blogger and Metaweblog API support.
- Trackback support.
- Trackback post auto-discovery.
- Comment spam prevention via URL blacklists.
- XML content inclusion from remote sources.
- Inclusion of results from remote execution of XPath queries on other Syncato sites.
- HTML administration interface.
The next release will add the following features.
- Features for 0.8 are coming soon
At the present time Syncato is a preliminary release made available for early adopters. It's very functional, but does require a fair amount of technical expertise to get running.