The Website
Now that we've discussed Verb's content management features, let's move on to the other important aspect of Verb: powerful website hosting that seamlessly integrates your managed content. Every Verb account includes a full-featured web hosting account that you have full control of. You may upload directly to it via FTP, serve your own HTML files, and run your own PHP scripts. It can do mostly everything that a standard web hosting account can do.
But the hosting environment on Verb is also enhanced with a number of awesome features that are not found on standard web hosting. Easily integrate your managed content through VerbML. Simplify your markup and stylesheets with Haml and Sass. Automatically make your URLs SEO friendly. Reduce download time with automatic Javascript minification, Gzipping, and intelligent use of Etags and expired headers. Intelligent caching minimizes page build times.
We are also experimenting with technologies that will automatically migrate your assets to a CDN (content delivery network) to make your webpages load faster than ever before.
In short, Verb bends over backwards to make your sites better, faster, and more compatible, without requiring you to do anything or even understand how it works.
In this chapter, we will explain how to use your Verb website hosting to the max and take advantage of all the features that make Verb awesome. Some sections of this chapter are intended for reference and can be skimmed over if you are reading this book straight through. But be sure to check out our Cookbook section, which includes some great tutorials that will show you how powerful Verb can be.
