Sometimes I work with WebGUI's back end so much (development) that I forget how easy it is to use WebGUI's front end (the user interface).

From time to time I wear every hat in our company, but my primary roles are as Plain Black's President, and as head of R&D. Neither of those roles requires me to publish much content, and when I do it's usually a blog post like this, or a wiki page, not as a content manager. In the past week or so I've had to do a lot of publishing projects for some of the new stuff we're working on, and I learned to love WebGUI all over again.

I'm not saying that we can't make WebGUI's publishing features any better than they are, only that I had forgotten how good they already are from an end user's point of view. When I'm developing, I'm using test data, so it's not a real publishing task, but in the past few weeks I've written lots of content, uploaded lots of photos, and even used the new Map asset that's available in 7.7 as a real content manager. It took seconds or at most minutes to do these tasks. In fact, it took me easily 10 times longer to write the content and snap the photos then it did to publish it using WebGUI. And even better than that, it was fun!

As developers, it's so easy to get into the routine of building tools and not using them. As we go forward, we need to get better at that. We need to use every feature in WebGUI as a normal user would. Doing that, we can make something that's already great, excellent.