Why use Populate?

Download the CMS software, set up or commission a server space, upload the CMS, set up a URL to resolve to the space and add a secure certificate. Add the plugins you require, check there are no compatibility issues.

Click 'create site' fill in a form.. you're ready to start work.

Set up your ftp credentials for each developer and add into your editing software. Make sure the files are being backed up and that the operators have a process where two of them can't be working on the same files.

Using our browser based template editor, you have fully tracible and backed up edits, check-in and check-out to avoid multiple operators editing the same files. No special software or licenses required. Contains a dynamic preview so you can edit multiple files at the same time and preview with a cmd-keypress.

If you hit snags dring the build phase you typically head to Google and stack overflow and try and solve the problem.

Contact our support, we're here to help.

You create admin accounts for the end client's team and they start populatng data.

We have a host of tools to make the import of data easier. Our product importer makes light work of a spreadsheet of thousands of products. Our translation module makes translating easy. Our admin features advanced privilege control to allow administrators access to only the areas they require.

What happens if the client has issues, typically they get on the phone and take you away from your current project

With Populate the client fills in a support ticket in the admin, we respond on your behalf within our guaranteed response time. If the problem is to do with any bespoke elements you may have built we will work with you to resolve the ticket.

How do you manage version updates, or more importantly, security patches of the CMS software or plugins? It's always tough to focus resources to a year old project, and the fear of a compatibility issue and an offline site, has meant many projects staying as they were built for many years. 

We do all of this for you. Rather than making huge changes months apart our centralised code approach allows us to continually refine and improve our code base. Our code is thoroughly tested on our staging server before being rolled out into the production environments.

Typically in a managed dedicated or vitual hosting enrionment this is managed for you, at least until a major update is required to something like a php version. On smaller projects it can be hard to justify revisiting a project so typically these are left using the same php version etc until they are retired.

How do you manage upgrades and pacthes to key server components?

We take care of all of this for you. Because in our environmnet this is all easily repeatable we can get our best solution, test it and roll it out the labour costs are split over all of the sites in the platform and the cost per site is easily absorbed into the subscription fee.

If you are managing the server and databases you are responsible for the safe storage or any personal data and the security of any backups. Whatever software and plugins you are using and the integrity of the code within them is your responsibility.

Because the only access to the data you have is via the admin, the front end routines and the API we are responsible for this. Every single line of code that interacts with the data was written by us, it all uses a standardised approach, all personal data is encrypted at rest and all database queries are parameterised. We have automated pen test routines and are constantly monitoring the whole platform for unwanted attention and potential breaches. The time you spend doing this is per project, or for a few projects, we can apply these efforts across a large number of sites and so can perform these tasks more cost effectively.

These often get overlooked in order to keep the budget realistic particularly on smaller projects.

Because we can apply these at platform level we can do so more cost effectively and efficiently so is all included in your monthly subscription fee.

keeping the logins and passwords for multiple admins and editing access to the files can be taxing.

Populate is cloud based with one admin panel and login for multiple projects.

At the end of your project you will need to ensure all of the data has been removed. Ofen a site is switched off but the files and databases left in place as its hard to allocate time to a project that is effectively over

We take care of this. When a subscription is cancelled we reach out to each customer to ensure this is deliberate and check what data they wish to extract before completely and permanently deleting all data.