Near the end of October 2008, I stood up in our conference room full of co-workers and presented a secret project I’d been developing under the radar: the newest version of our own content management system, datAvenger. We’d been using versions of datAvenger for years as the engine to drive the sites we build, but I believed this new version was the best we’d ever produced.

Two years and many updates later, it’s still the machinery that makes many of our sites work. We believe that you should be able to manage the content that’s on your own site. datAvenger lets you do that with style. Need to add some formatting or an image to your home page? It just takes a few clicks. Want a page with a form or a photo gallery? It’ll only take a few minutes to create. Recently we’ve added features to make site management even easier, including drag and drop asset uploading and Google Analytics integration. (We’re even working on a way to integrate datAvenger with mySephone. More about that soon!)

We built datAvenger ourselves so that we can listen to requests from people who use it and keep delivering enhancements all the time. We use a bunch of great tools under the hood (CakePHP, jQuery, and more), and every site that uses datAvenger as its engine receives the latest new updates and features free of charge as soon as we release them.

We’re really happy with the results. After two years, there are now over 250 datAvenger accounts. datAvenger sites as a whole have just under 600 pages, and users have added almost 8,000 assets (images and documents) to their sites. Visitors like it, too; we average around 200,000 pageviews per month if you combine the stats for all of our datAvenger sites. Best of all, there have been over 19,000 revisions to datAvenger pages; a revision is created whenever somebody makes changes to a page. I’m especially happy with that last stat, because I think it speaks to how easy datAvenger makes it to manage your own content.

Thanks to all of our dA users for the last two years. Some of the 250 accounts are using our completely free version of datAvenger; if you think you might be interested in simple content management, go sign up for datAvenger and try it for yourself!