DSC

A new community site starts with Kit.  This provides a comprehensive, robust, well tested foundation.  For some community sites that's all that is required. Kit provides a wide variety of features and it's built from the ground up as a Community system. It's designed to allow content to be readily updated and provides lots of features to help multiple editors of different skill levels to use it.  

Kit has lots of modern features - drag and drop simplicity, in-place editing, social network integration, image slideshows/carousels as well as some seriously well thought out editing features, like revisions, a full audit-trail history for each document, auto-save, built-in todo lists and more.  

Unlike many Content Management Systems, Kit is completely with restriction  in terms of the look of absolutely everything on the page. You (or your designer, or developer) can go right down to the CSS and HTML level if you need to, all without leaving the friendly, help-filled administrative interface of Kit.

Kit is a Community Management System as well as Content Management System, so it handles things like discussion forums with aplomb.  Because we've had to moderate discussion forums ourselves in the past, we know what a nuisance it is to have to go to a separate "admin only" section of the web app to perform moderation tasks.  So instead, we've built them right in to the forum - moderates do their moderation whilst reading the forums. Not only that, but we know how useful it is to do things like keep notes for other moderators to see, right up there next to the users' posts.  If you've ever moderated a website before you're going to love doing that job in Kit.

Whilst Kit's functionality is broad, we don't pretend it has every function that everyone could wish for.  Plenty of sites have very specific requirements for functionality not found in any Content Management System.   That's where our pedigree as web application developers comes in.

DSC is a company of web application developers, with a strong history of delivering first class custom software. We used that experience and skill to build Kit.  But we can also use it to extend Kit.  As someone buying a system, you can have the best of both worlds - all the efficiencies of an off the shelf system, low cost, low development risk, short time to market, maturity, reliability, finely honed functionality, with the flexibility and power of a custom-built system, developed by experts, without the custom-built price tag.

Customising an off the shelf system is not a new idea, nor is it unique to DSC.  Popular CMS systems, like Wordpress, Drupal or vBulletin have a plethora of plug-ins and add-on modules available.  They're of variable quality - some are fabulous but others much less so. But when it comes to adding truly custom functionality you find you have to do a lot of work, or use antiquated techniques that developers don't really want to use, or your add-on code is like a second class citizen, not having full access to the internals of the system - a bolt on that never quite fits properly and always feels like an afterthought.  With Kit, because it was designed from the outset to be extended, add on modules are quick and easy to create and they are fully fledged parts of the system.