I saw another reference to xSitePro for building fast sites and decided to take another look at it. I discovered you can download a complete version for a 30 day trial for free. So I did that and have now spent some time looking at it.
It's interesting that it is a site builder just like DreamWeaver in some ways. DreamWweaver is designed to allow experts to build and support large custom websites. xSitePro is designed to help people with few technical skills rapidly publish many relatively simple websites.
They have some really easy ways to harvest content from article sites and rss feeds. They released version 2 in 2008, are offering a discount now, so I would guess version 3 isn't to far away. You can really see the scope creep. Lots of handy features for building those cheap and simple sites. But then more and more ways to add customization and more advanced features.
Try as they will, it still has a learning curve. I tried to take one of their templates and make it match one of our custom templates. I got most of it, but there were still several elements where I had not yet figured out where their settings are coming from. The distinction between a color set by a background setting and one set by an image is frequently not obvious. :)
xSitePro has a PayPal button service but it only does a buy it now button, and not a cart/view cart setup. We recently discovered and wrote about the value of using a specific URL as an SKU (Shop Keeping Unit). It's exciting because it eliminates the need to develop a new system for tracking products which is one of the big headaches of running an online store. I don't know yet how hard/easy/possible that will be with xSitePro.
They seem to have a pretty good handle on linking all the pages and automating the site map and navigation button setup. There is also a reasonably intuitive system for adding keywords, descriptions, titles and all that kind of seo stuff to pages. They seem quite proud of the siloing feature which is new in version 2. I think it might work well for doing books where chapters have a lot of pages. They do Amazon links, but not Ebay. They allow adding code snippets so adding Ebay
should not be a big deal. They have a search widget which I haven't tried out. I suspect it will be weak compared to G's site search. Presumably the snippet feature would let you replace their site search with Googles.
Since it is a system that installs on your PC and is then uploaded the sites should not suffer from the update cycle like WordPress does. They also assume from the start you are going to have a lot of sites and provide tools to manage and reuse stuff between them. For example, they assume you will have collections of related sites and the first task is to set up a project, into which you add websites.
xSitePro websites don't require a database. That means moving a website to a different server is much easier than it is to move a WordPress based site. Readers without much hosting experience will be shocked at how frequently hosting companies require customers to move their sites to a new or different server. It's always a pain and if you have a lot of sites the time required can be a problem.
I think xSitePro might work well for a subject like my home security idea which will be mostly content pages rather than lists of products. xSitePro comes closer to WordPress in terms of the ease with which you can change the navigation structure on the fly. I see there are
tutorials on how to make WordPress a seamless part of your xSitePro site, but that looks like a shotgun wedding I want nothing to do with 
To some extent it's quite a lesson in how much work is required to have a software product ready to sell. They have a 20 minute intro video that does a nice run though their system. Then they have a 250page PDF to get into more detail. Then they have a 1,000 page PDF that covers the real details. For an additional fee (only $360/per year according to a forum poster.) they have a membership site with more videos, etc. There has obviously been a lot of money spent developing the stuff.
Content management systems like this always gets into code at some point. With xSitePro it's the siloing feature where they say you have to be able to run php on your server, and give you a tool to make sure you can.
They have image gallery and slide show features I haven't touched yet.
