Sitebuilder Overview

Parallels Plesk Sitebuilder is a web application designed for easy creating and publishing web sites on the Internet. Sitebuilder is developed to run on Unix/Linux and Windows platforms. Plesk Sitebuilder for Linux/Unix or Windows can be installed either as a stand-alone system with the ability to publish to any server or group of servers via FTP, or as a Plesk-integrated add-on with the ability for Plesk domain owners to access Sitebuilder to design, build and publish sites within the Plesk interface.

On the administrative side, Sitebuilder enables managing resources such as hosts, user accounts, plans, and web sites. On the site-owner side, Sitebuilder allows creating and publishing web sites, and updating site content. In accordance with these tasks, Plesk Sitebuilder system is logically split into two parts: sites creating Wizard and Administration panel.

With the Administration panel, hosting providers can quickly and easily tailor Sitebuilder to their needs, for instance, by building a hierarchy of different plans, which define some subsets of Sitebuilder functionality available to different user levels, or by preparing page sets (site content templates), which help site owners with specific needs to start building sites.

The five-steps Wizard enables easily creating web sites and publishing them on the Internet. The Wizard is the main tool for site owners. Because of rich set of site design templates shipped in different color schemes, WYSIWYG editor, and a number of interactive modules, such as Blog, Image Gallery, Guestbook, eShop, the Wizard provides an effortless way for site owners to create, modify and update their websites without any technical skills or HTML knowledge.

The Sitebuilder administrator can make the Wizard also available for anonymous visitors, called guest users, who are, in fact, potential site owners. They can create trial sites in Sitebuilder but cannot publish them on the Internet. After a guest user creates a trial site, he or she is offered to purchase a hosting service to publish the site on the Internet.

Most of the Sitebuilder functionality is available through SOAP-based API, which makes possible automation of the administrative tasks and integration against external software.