How TourCMS works

Sorry, we are going to get a bit techie here - so if this isn't your cup of tea - we suggest you ask us to explain it.... or just be happy that you only need a web browser to use TourCMS - and the information on this page isn't that relevant!

The following diagram shows where TourCMS sits within your website infrastructure.

Overview
TourCMS is centrally web hosted. We manage all the data, the backups, the hardware maintenance, the midnight phone calls etc. If you are a web design agency, once you have got your client live - you can leave us to worry about supporting their future needs.

We integrate with your website in a number of ways.

Firstly, at a very basic level, we can just add a booking engine to your existing website - and not worry about your website at all. You can always enhance the use of TourCMS at a later stage. TourCMS works fine just as a bookings management system.

Secondly, we can integrate fully with your website. You place your HTML layer templates within TourCMS and within these templates place our web design tags. These tags are replaced by your data (for example tour descriptions, prices & availability) when your web pages are rebuilt - and then FTPed to your own webserver. (more information)

You can FTP to multiple web servers. In the diagram above TourCMS is connecting to 2 web sites that you are running, from a single TourCMS account. You can put different tours onto different websites - so if you have a website about one city and a 2nd website about tours to a 2nd city.... this can be done.

Pros and cons

Advantages:

• Scales - regardless how many users hit your website - because they are not hitting any database files - you can sustain any number of visitors without any scaling issues. Besides, these pages are on your website - so scaling issues can be resolved by you
• You can integrate with your own website to any extent you like - for example you could just use TourCMS to manage a couple of pages (like pages that list dates & prices) or you could manage your entire site within TourCMS
• Not just HTML - because you control the templates you could send text files or XML instead of HTML pages to your web server. For example see how we can create an RSS XML file for special offers using TourCMS web design tags. You can then code your own search (or AJAX) against your own XML / text files.
• Not just text - you can also put PHP (and other scripting language) files within TourCMS and get them updated and set to your webserver
• Add other functionality - because you run your own website, you can add blogs, forums etc to your website without worrying whether it will work alongside TourCMS. It will work. It is your website. Do what you like!

Disadvantages:

• You have to rebuild when content changes - rather than it being automatic - when you make a change to your data, you need to actively choose to update your website.
• No database access to your core data from your website - some may call this an advantage though!