Friday, March 16, 2007
This post is an early indication of where EditMe is heading. It's about a concept we're calling Total Site Customization. We get lots of requests from customers who want to do this or that with their site - features that aren't really part of any wiki product, stuff that would require custom programming just for that site. Wiki application hosts like EditMe typically don't want to customize their product for individual customers. Not only is contract development not part of their business plan, but managing hundreds of permutations of their software would quickly become unmanageable. As a result, these requests end up as unrequited "feature requests". Total site customization is our way of addressing this customer need.
How will it work? We're in the process of replacing XSL layouts with a simple template scripting system. This system will make modification of site layouts much more accessible. As many of our customers have found, XSL is an extremely cryptic and unforgiving template language, and cannot do things like connect to your site's database and get a list of pages that match certain criteria.
The new template system will be easier to "read" and, as indicated previously, will have the ability to connect to your site's database and perform tasks like updating page content, managing comments, displaying the results of a custom search, and so on.
We know that most of our customers are not programmers. With that in mind, the new template system will allow three things: 1) Non-technical customers will be able to modify their site's layout more easily than before, though we know most won't be layout customization gurus. 2) EditMe will be able to provide a vast array of custom features to customers who wish to pay for custom development services. 3) Down the road, we hope to build a development community to provide these customization services for customers.
We're thinking way outside of the WIKI box here. Professional looking fully content managed web sites and even web applications will be within reach of some very simple scripting and EditMe's low monthly hosting fees. We hope to share more details about this direction in future blog posts. In the mean time, let us know what you think.
