Finale - Custom Coded Sites in less than an hour

I was a little torn with where to post this, but I suppose the overall concept we've developed here is a site builder as you might call it. We call it Finale, mostly because we've developed what we feel is an end-all for media based sites.

The concept itself is kind of hard to grasp, but put into layman's terms, it's a system where we can take a layout, just a shell with a few fake placeholders, and insert a few keymarkers in the areas the content needs to go, and taking values from a configuration file we setup, it literally custom codes a site. And by custom, we literally mean custom, not some crappy little code that has 2309597239725 million options in it that can't handle the slightest amount of traffic without slowing down, we're talking on a midgrade server we run, maybe 4 or 5 sites, about 1-2k hits a piece, 90% of the day, the load average reads 0.00.

Custom in the sense that the options you want (read from the config file), are the options you get. If you want titles and thumbnails, but no descriptions, and you want it to convert your videos to flv automatically and autothumbnail them instead of having to make an upload them manually, the code comes out with everything for those options, and none of the ones you don't want. If you don't have any use for ratings, comments, thumbnails, descriptions, or any number of options, there isn't any mention at all of it in the code. The code is slim, precise, and to the point. The point was to model it after Slackware: everything you need, nothing you don't.

Aside from the code being slim, it's heavily optimized. We've got plenty of experience in this department, for example the new shooshtime.com site, that would be us, as well of a large number of other sites that we've done. We're not the new kids on the block at all, and everything is heavily Search Engine Optimized (SEO), and all of the code and the database is as efficient and optimized as we could possibly get it. If you can do a better job, you're either smoking something really good (and in which case please share with the rest of us), or we might have a job for you, but in all seriousness, it's fast, lite and to the point.

Just to clarify, this isn't using SMARTY, it's not using any other frameworks or underlying structure, it was built from the ground up, 100% custom code, and as much as I hate to admit it, we've made it almost so perfect that if you paid us to do a custom job, the code would line up 90+%, and probably wouldn't run much faster.

A demo that we've setup is www.crazyvideosite.com Just a regular video site, handles comments, ad rotations, ratings (ajax, that's apart of the layout), and some pretty fun little features. It's just a middle-grade site that we did, nothing special, it's really hard to show the diversity of the script. It can support videos (wmv or whatever standard format, or it can autoconvert and use a flash video player, it comes with a free generic player), images (some fun little javascript in place to handle being able to view it at full size if it's larger than your viewing section), flash (animations, games, whatever it is you want), plugs to other sites, and if there is really something else that your heart desires, I'm sure we could come to an arrangement and include it into the script.

Ads are another thing we know are vastly important, without them, a site really doesn't make much money at all. So in order to maximize your revenue and help keep things simple but efficient, you specify what ad areas you want, and you can insert as many ads into that space as you want (you can temporarily disable some if need-be), and it'll randomly pull one of the ads in that space and show it in rotation with the others. If you've got an HTML code from an ad program, or just a banner and a link, it supports both, as well as being able to set media specific ads if that tickles your fancy. Often times you may have special videos from different programs, and as a part of the requirements you have to show their ad banners in the same place (plus it helps your sales, so why not). You get to setup special ad rotations for your media (if that's an option you want of course), and then set different media to display different ads above and below the content that varies depending on what you're looking at.

There really is too much to go into detail, and just about everything is variable. The default lins for the media is <id#>_<title>.html, but you can put them in any order you want, in any way you want, just as long as you it has the id and title, it's just a quick change in the config file, and voila, all the links on the site go to the method you choose, and just about everything on the site is changeable in that way. If you choose to have searches, every search is efficiently logged and tallied, so you get a nice breakdown of the top 100 search terms that your users are looking for, to help you better understand your audience and be able to pick media that better fits what they're interested in.

If you want to find out more, and/or would like to see the demo and the administration, we have a few more sites running the CMS we'd be happy to show, just ask away and we'll send you the information you want. Right now the turn around we're looking at is 1-2 days, but like the title says, we could easily have it done in under an hour if you have the template. The base price is $400, we're not going to nickle and dime for every feature, we are charging $20 if you need us to install the extra software that handles the auto video conversion and auto thumbs if that's an option you choose, and then layouts are depending. We can do custom layouts, that's not included with the code, and we have several designers on hand specifically setup for this, or if you have the PSD of your design, we charge $40 to chop it up into nice and compliant HTML/CSS (no tables!) for you, but if you've got the layout in hand, ready to go, in all actuality a site could be up in running in about a half an hour if that was needed. Thanks for reading, if you want to get ahold of one of our sales team, you can find us on AIM at FinaleCMS and FinaleCMS Sales, or drop an email to


And if you still happen to be reading, we offer free updates for 6 months, and if you want to change something on your site in that period, we'll do one for free. You get all of the source code, we don't do any of that bullshit ioncube or zend encoding, you're free to change it as you want, but you may not resell the script in part or in any form (not that it's easy since it's all molded to your site nice and cleanly to provide optimal performance). We're constantly updating and improving our code, so if you have a feature in mind you'd like, tell us about it and we'd be glad to implement it into the next version.

And if anyone wants to buy crazyvideosite.com, it's just a demo site so we don't mind getting rid of it, just make an offer around the cost of the CMS and we'll be glad to talk