Content Management - CMS
Shortly after I began working on
ActiveType I came across James Shaw’s
Dozing Dogs CMS. I’ll be interested to see how
Telligent incorporates the CMS into upcoming Community Server releases.
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago I’m currently working on a .NET Content Management System called ActiveType. My recent focus has been on creating a new UI for the administrative interface for ActiveType. To help with this effort I contracted Encytpemedia to redesign the administration UI for the CMS. I posted a couple small screen shots of the new UI within my “Encytemedia redesigns ActiveType (CMS)” post, but, since I’m now done with the implementation of the new look I wanted to provide additional screenshots for your viewing pleasure.
This is the screen where you manage the “channels” within a site. I’m planning on rename this to “Category” or “Folder”, opinions?
A list screen, with a confirmation being displayed. Also shows the “Quick Create” boxes that are within the app.
A page to view comments, and yes I need to add paging 
This shows the layout of the edit screens within ActiveType.
This is the first page that will be shown when logging into the admin. Obviously the lorem ipsum will be replaced. I have a couple sketches that outline what data and actions will be made available. Anything that you’d like at your fingertips when first logging in?
This shows the inline toolbar that is displayed as you browse a site when logged in as a content author.
After clicking “Edit Content” the content author is presented with inline editing capabilities of posts. Each “page” is made up of a set of content which is plugged into “placeholder controls” that are placed on the template (aspx).
So what do you think? Does it look like something you’d like to use? If so drop me a comment or an email to be notified when a beta (alpha?) is available.
The images within this post are posted on Flickr (which reminds me that I’d like to a create a Flickr placeholder control) so you can view all the images in this post by browsing to my ActiveType set on Flickr.
As I’ve mentioned a couple times on this blog I’m currently working on a .NET content management system. I’m targeting a release sometime around when .NET 2.0 releases, however, I’m hoping to have some beta releases in the next couple of months.
As I was evaluating the CMS a couple months back I was less then pleased with the UI of the administrative interface. I had done the “design” myself and beings that I’m not a designer it wasn’t good. I began looking around for designer/developers who could assist with a redesign of the interface. When it came down to it I decided to go with Justin Palmer of Encytemedia. I actually came across Justin’s site as I was doing some investigation of Ruby on Rails. He developed a template for Typo (RoR blog engine) which I liked so I dropped him an email to see if he’d be interested.
As you can see by the title of this post Justin was interested so we got started. The major goals of the project where to create a new fresh, clean UI for the administrative interface of the CMS, as well as to create a standards based design that would make the application viewable in all major browsers.
The results can be seen in the screenshots in this post, as well as within Justin’s writeup of the project.
I’ll be making available a demo of the application in the next couple weeks and will begin a beta period shortly after that. If you’re interested in getting an early peak at ActiveType leave a comment here and I’ll be sure to contact you when things are ready to roll.
Read more details on Justin’s blog
As you might know by now I’m in the process of creating a .NET content management system that is going to target .NET 2.0. I have a large portion of the functionality complete and have been doing some reviews of the application to identify areas that I should focus on. One of the things that I’ve been considering is swapping out my custom “Entity Framework” for one of the more popular O/R Mappers that are out there. This would have a couple benefits:
1) People customizing the CMS would be able to learn something that would be useful in other projects as opposed to learning my custom framework which would be helpful in nothing else.
2) By leveraging an existing O/R Mapper I should be able to add additional features and functionality to the application since the other mappers are more feature rich.
3) Individuals who are familiar with the O/R Mapper may be more likely to go with a CMS that uses the mapper, maybe?
4) I get to focus less on the mapper and more on the features and functionality of the CMS.
There are of course some disadvantages:
1) Time required to migrate the code from my existing mapper would take away from other things. There is also some functionality within my core framework that leverages the existing framework for UI Mapping, Business Object Validation, and etc that would need to be ported over to support the new mapper.
2) Relying on another mapper increases risk slightly since I’m now reliant on a mapper which I don’t “control”.
What advantages and disadvantages do you see? Do you like the idea of having a .NET Content Management System (CMS) that is built on top of one of the more popular O/R Mappers out there? If you could choose what mapper which one would it be?
Yesterday I was checking out the beta of Technorati and it got me thinking about the role of tagging in a content management system and/or blog engine. It seems like it would be a very useful feature to include for allowing authors to assign relevant categories that could be used in numerous ways within the application. If tagging became a part of all the interactions within the engine it could lead to a system that could provide developers with a very interesting way to pull out all sorts of interesting information from the system that would otherwise have to be explicitly coded in.
For blogging systems I love the idea that Technorati has implemented in their beta. If you do a tag search for something like “Star Wars” they load the 3 most recent posts tagged “Star Wars”, the top 20 posts for the keyword match. They also show a list of photos from Flickr that match the tag as well as links from Furl and delicious that have the same tag. Interesting stuff.
From a content management perspective it seems like tagging could be a valuable feature to implement into the core of a system. One of the things that I often run into within CMS systems is the inability to setup relationships and links between “items” in the system. By making tagging a core concept within a content management system you could open up a lot of possibilities when it comes to building interesting relationships among content items within the system.
Tagging seems to be showing up all over the web lately, is tagging within content management systems the next logical step?
Dan Rubin, of superflousbanter fame, is looking to create a Designer CMS on Rails. I would have loved it if he said he was looking to create a Designer CMS on .NET . My goals for ActiveType are very much inline with what he outlined in his post.
- Easy to incorporate into existing projects
- Easy to integrate with new projects
- Easy to tweak without being a programmer
- Easy to use (for designers, developers and clients)
I still have a ways to go before I get there but I think I'm making progress. I recently had a designer create a new UI for the CMS Administrative interface (screenshots coming soon) which should make the overall experience of working the ActiveType much better for content contributors. My overall goal is to allow most users to do 99% of the tasks required for managing their site directly through the in-context toolbars and menus. More advanced tweaks to the system will still require launching the administration interface, but, the majority of users should be able to just browse to the page or folder they want to update and use the editor toolbar to quickly incorporate their changes into the site.
If Dan get's any traction with his Rails powered CMS I'll be sure to check it out for inspiration!