Bitrix Site Manager Launches Two New Versions

Following just a few months after the release of Site Manager 7.0, Bitrix last week announced two new editions of Site Manager intended for sites that need to support heavy traffic and e-commerce.The two new editions -- Site Manager Premium and Site Manager Ultimate -- bring the total number of versions up to seven. The Bitrix site has a helpful chart with a rundown of all of the features, requirements, and pricing for each edition. One downside, however, is that the features aren't à la carte, and you may have to buy an edition with features you might not use in order to get features that you need.

The e-commerce functionality, available in the new Ultimate and the existing Small Business editions, adds payment and user account features. This makes the creation and management of a storefront significantly easier, and does a nice job of rounding out Site Manager's feature set.

Both new editions feature beefed-up platforms for building sites with resilience under high traffic loads. Along the same lines, support for Oracle and MS SQL databases has been added to the existing MySQL support. That's likely to broaden Site Manager's appeal.

Site Manager has built a substantial customer base by offering feature-rich products at a value-minded price. While it isn't open source, it shares some flexibility with those platforms because the source code is included with the license of the Premium and Ultimate editions. It's certainly worth a look for organizations that need to build a site with a flexible, solid framework on a budget.