At Thirdfloor Software Works we spend roughly 2/3 of our time in research and development of the best tools for publishers. It's our lifeblood, our passion, and our playtime.

Thirdfloor specializes in providing just what publishers need - a way to gather and organize editorial material into regular issues.

Gazette is not simply a "web content management" system. Those sort of solutions are great if you are building a web site, but not so great if you want to manage a serious publication over time.

And we don't sell you the software. You're a publisher, not an engineer. We handle all the initial technical stuff for you, provide all the web servers and bandwidth, hold your hand through the initial online development phases, work with your HTML jockeys and stick around afterwards to answer your editors' questions.

Gazette is constantly evolving, with new tools added regularly. We tweak and perfect the existing ones too, in direct response to our users comments. If you need something changed, just ask. If you need some new functionality added, just ask. Chances are, it's in our development pipeline anyway, and we can fast track it for you.

We use Python

Python is a portable, interpreted, object-oriented programming language. Its development started in 1990 at CWI in Amsterdam, and continues under the ownership of the Python Software Foundation. The language has an elegant (but not over-simplified) syntax; a small number of powerful high-level data types are built in. Python can be extended in a systematic fashion by adding new modules implemented in a compiled language such as C or C++. Such extension modules can define new functions and variables as well as new object types.

High-profile Python projects include the Mailman mailing list manager and the Zope application server. Several Linux distributions, most notably Red Hat, have written part or all of their installer and system administration software in Python. Companies that use Python internally include Google, Yahoo, and Industrial Light & Magic.

We aim to be Standards Compliant

• XHTML
• CSS

What are web standards?

"The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), along with other groups and standards bodies, has established technologies for creating and interpreting web-based content. These technologies, which we call 'web standards', are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users while ensuring the long-term viability of any document published on the Web. Designing and building with these standards simplifies and lowers the cost of production, while delivering sites that are accessible to more people and more types of Internet devices. Sites developed along these lines will continue to function correctly as traditional desktop browsers evolve, and as new Internet devices come to market."

What are the benefits of using web standards

A site that has been built to web standards generally will be:

• Less bandwidth intense
• Future-proof
• Extensibility
• Easier to maintain
• Compatible with newer browsers
• Accessible