Customize for Your Business

Add customizations to set your business apart from the competition.

As your business grows, you'll likely find that any external software system will only get your business so far, not all the way there. For a true solution that fits your business, you need the ability to customize and adapt the software - to polish it with the features and functions that will set you apart from your competitors, whether that means adding features that make it easier for your customers to do business with you, or enhancing software workflows to make your internal systems more efficient. This is why the SoftSlate Cloud Platform (SCP) was designed from the ground up to be extended and customized.

Customized Software Features

SCP comes out-of-the box with robust functionality for ecommerce, content management, customer relations management, and more. But there are many situations unique to your business, and often you need to tweak how something works, or add specific business logic to a particular function. SoftSlate has over 20 years experience adapting our software for clients' specific needs, and our system was built from the ground up with customization and extendability in mind. The platform includes:

  • A system of over 2,000 hook points where you or your developers can manipulate the application logic to suit your needs. (From a technical point of view, the hook points correspond to methods in the application code, where you can apply your own programming code to adjust the incoming arguments or returned results).
  • An events system that triggers whenever any record in the system is modified, which you can also hook into, to apply your own programming logic at a very low level.
  • Well-defined integration functions that can be changed or added, for very common customizations such as new payment processors, shipping processors, or exports.
New Software Features

You are not stuck with just modifying the existing SCP features and functionality. SCP also can serve simply as a hosting platform for brand new features you develop. The advantages to starting from scratch are numerous:

  • SCP is hosted on the AWS platform using best practices for security, load balancing, WAF, logging, backups, session management, and more. You don't have to spend time figuring all these things out and maintaining them.
  • SCP provides a ready-made employee console with authentication and authorization functions built in. This means you don't have to worry about developing an entire framework for logging in your employees and giving them permissions. You can just add your new administrative functions to the menu, and associate them with a role in the system, then give your employees that role.
  • If your application is customer-facing, the customer interface provides another secure area for authenticated users representing your customers as opposed to your employees. Password resets, password rules including complexity rules and lockouts, self-registration, and Google Sign In are all supported features.
  • Our system of integration functions means you can attach your feature to the request processing of the SCP, to respond to custom requests. Define the endpoint and the parameters you are responding to, and have the system hand the request off to your code for processing.
Data Sync

You have the data. And you want to keep it where it is. But you want to create an application that works with it, or use it to enhance an existing SCP feature. SCP has a number of tools you can use to synchronize your data back and forth between the two systems, for those common cases where you want your existing system to remain the system of record.

  • Imports and exports from both the administrator interface, and via the API - Site jobs may be set up to run custom code to import, export, or manipulate data at regular intervals.
  • Every record in the SCP system has a "sync code", a unique identifier that cannot be changed. This can be immensely useful when syncing changes back and forth.
  • Most SCP entities have a 'settings' child entity attached to it, where any sort of custom data may be stored. The application code, integration functions, and UI templates can then refer to that data.
  • SCP triggers events whenever it changes data, and you can hook into these events, or poll them, to inform your home system.
API

A key factor in adapting SCP to your business's particular needs is the SCP API. With nearly 1,000 endpoints, the API covers searching for, editing, adding, and deleting any record under any entity in the system, just as you can with the administrator console. You can use it to create entirely new UI applications, synchronize with your existing systems, or customize the functions of SCP. In addition the API features:

  • A Swagger interface for developers to be able to test each API endpoint, and see the technical requirements for using each endpoint.
  • A separate set of API users with different password requirements than normal (human) users. You can configure these users for strong password requirements, expiring passwords, and so on.
  • The same fine-grained Role system is available as for human employees, so you can give API users only the permissions they need and should have, for best security.