Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: CMS or Opportunity Platform?

Author:Jim Roepcke
Posted:5/23/1999; 12:21:48 AM
Topic:Things we learned from BucksWoodside.Com
Msg #:6593 (In response to 6589)
Prev/Next:6592 / 6594

If you're thinking about Frontier as an Opportunity Platform, go for it.

Sorry to disappoint, but no I'm not thinking about Frontier as an Opportunity Platform... not that it shouldn't be one for others.

Which questions do you feel have not been addressed?

  1. Should I expect to have to roll my own editorial system to get the above features, or are these things I should expect UserLand to provide?
  2. Is Frontier [snip] still a vendor-supported content management system that wants to compete with other content management tool providers? (with emphasis on competing with other content management tools, on a feature basis, not direction basis)
  3. Is WebEdit 2.0 going to be released?
  4. Will ContentServer ever be updated to take advantage of Nirvana features or guest databases? If so, when?

Here's rationale for the questions...

1 & 2. With CS and DG, a person (me) still has to do a lot of work to get things flowing into a website, never mind trying to implement the features I listed (in bullets) in #6562. I hear you saying that others are developing tools for this market -- that's great, but I don't want to have to pay them a maintenance subscription fee on top of UserLand... I'm paying the yearly update so that I see continual improvement in core CMS features. If the 'community' comes up with some great CMS stuff, that doesn't mean I can count on them to fix bugs or maintain compatibility with whatever comes down UserLand's pipe. And if 3rd parties drop off the face of the earth or stop supporting their Frontier tools down the road, we'd be equally screwed. If this stuff comes from UserLand, then I only need to worry about Frontier dropping off the face of the earth -- and if that does happen, it won't matter if 3rd parties or the community is still supporting it, because we'd be migrating off of it at that point.

To extend that, it's great to see UserLand extending its reach into markets it can succeed in, but there's still unfinished business wrt core team-based web publishing. Look at NetObjects TeamFusion or Adobe GoLive Publishing Server if you're wondering what the competition is doing in the same price (order of magnitude-wise, anyway)

I believe Frontier can do all the things other tools do. The question I'm asking is, will that ever happen, or is this just a pipe dream I need to give up on?

So... I'm looking for UserLand to provide me with these kinds of features on the Frontier platform -- not 3rd parties. And I don't have time or money to write it myself.

3. There were some new things in WebEdit 2 that made it more feasible to simply build on top of it. Will this be released? If so, when? Soon (ie: weeks) or after your current priorities (Linux, workstation and services) are completed?

4. ContentServer is a lost child. I have no idea what you guys are planning on doing with it -- but if you tell me I should use the discuss.root structure and the DG APIs, etc. for building my own thing, I *DO* want ContentServer to fit into that picture, without having to write yet more glue... 'cause some day, it might come from UserLand and the last thing I need to do is duplicate effort that might be coming through the root updates process.

If your current major tasks are Linux, the Workstation product, and services (portals, syndication and hosting???), I estimate that would take at least 10 months to complete all three.

After that, will UserLand's new major tasks be working on some or all of the things I (and others) have been requesting, or will your direction at that point be related to whatever shakes out of the current tasks, or will they be related to whatever new opportunity comes around the corner that's "too good to pass up" like you said the RSS opportunity was (and rightly so).

I need to know what I should and shouldn't be writing myself, to minimize re-creating the wheel.

I want to mention that I haven't been building on the mainResponder and/or DG stuff at all. Why? Because my real needs of workflow management aren't really met any better with the new stuff than it was with the old stuff. What mainResponder and DG gives me is a newer and better way to do lots of work on my own -- but doesn't necessarily (in my opinion) make it any easier or faster. Either way I'm writing a lot of new code -- with 6.0, it's just different code that with 5.1.

During the 6.0 development process I was really psyched about this stuff. As you know, I tried to get involved really early, because I was developing a training course about content management with Frontier.

I wanted to tell the students that there would be built-in tools for doing corporate workflow, of some sort. What was delivered was more along the lines of a very flexible discussion group interface that could be made into a corporate workflow system.

This wasn't something that was going to help these newbies who really weren't interested in becoming Frontier-hackers, they just wanted to master the website framework and cool things like scalable content.

To tell these people that they would need to contract us (the company I work for, the one providing the training) to get the workflow features they needed wasn't going to fly, because it would look like an attempt to make people pay for the opportunity of paying us much more over time. Regardless of these training customers, we needed this stuff ourselves too.

I would have loved to have taken a good stab and implementing these things myself -- I probably could have done most of what I'm asking for myself, given enough time. But the reality is that my employer always has me more than occupied with other projects, whether they're web sites or web apps. I basically gave up the notion that we'd have time to do this ourselves. It's a good thing, because I was right.

Before I forget, I agree that UserLand's development processes have improved greatly and that is greatly appreciated.

I guess there's a lot of information to chew on there. I really hope you'll answer the questions numbered at the top of this message. I really need to know the answers to those questions.

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