What is Daisy?

Think Content, not Pages

In our knowledge-driven society, users demand tools that allow to work with their information easily, flexible, and with a low barrier to entry. Daisy is a content management application that focusses on information and knowledge, rather than on pages of a website.

Conceptually, Daisy has been designed to provide a great out-of-the-box experience, with all the common tools and functionality people expect from a CMS. Daisy's programming-free configurability allows people to configure their own document types, with the editing environment adjusting accordingly. Add a dash of custom styling to that, and a great content application can be up and running in very little time.

Daisy's foundations are rock-solid however, with reliance on industry-standard storage technology, and lots of integration hooks available throughout the system. The powerful messaging subsystem, combined with enterprise workflow capabilities, allow Daisy to be used in any kind or size of organization.

Real WYSIWYG and text processing support

Daisy doesn't leave you behind with a tiny editing applet crammed into a fancy web interface.

Our WYSIWYG HTML authoring support is second to none, and pro-actively cleans out ugly HTML markup to ensure the storage of XML-compliant content, that can be used both on the Web and in print. Daisy's WYSIWYG editor has been tested to really work in real production environments. Yes, that means keyboard shortcuts as well. No need to switch to another application anymore for some real text crunching.

Next to HTML, Daisy maintains full-text search indices for most common file formats, such as PDF, OpenOffice and Microsoft Office formats.

Daisy Books allows you to generate a book rendition from a selection of Daisy-managed content, with table of contents and indexing, no less.

Metadata to the Max

Daisy doesn't confine documents to the limiting view that all content should be stored in a hierarchical folder structure.

Its hierarchy-free, structured storage model allows for content classification, searching and access control through the use of powerful metadata constructs. Content classification schemes can be built organically using the tagging metaphor, or one can restrict possible metadata values to predefined lists of allowed values.

Better yet, Daisy provides a faceted browser to drill down in your content repository using your own metadata. And those same metadata fields can be used to set up your own preferred access control scheme.

Daisy's query language is available to search information, but queries can also be embedded in documents and even navigation trees. That way, the most dynamic parts of a website can be live views on the content repository: content editors need not to worry anymore about where to attach documents to a website navigation structure, as this is done automatically. Less chance for mistakes, and more automation, all through comprehensive metadata support.

Needless to say, all of this, again, without touching any code.

Solid, Open Foundations

Daisy is 100% open source code. We don't reserve enterprise features for proprietary versions of Daisy: anything Daisy, be it source code, prepackaged release versions or documentation, is available under a liberal open source license. Liberal for use, for re-use and for re-distribution.

Daisy is a 100% open source community. The Daisy family of users and contributors encompasses the globe and has been growing steadily since day one. Its mailing list provides quality support, tips and advice, while commercial enterprise support remains available from Outerthought.

Thirdly, Daisy is supported by a strong commercial backing of funding customers. More than 50% of Daisy's development cost has been financed directly by contributions of paying customers. That means Daisy does what actual, real-life users want to pay for.

Technically, Daisy has been built upon decidedly non-esoteric technology: Java, a relational database and a filesystem store. Proven technology which actually works.