Hi, I'm JT and these are my thoughts on community, content management, Plain Black, and WebGUI.
Hi, I'm JT and these are my thoughts on community, content management, Plain Black, and WebGUI.
Some of the other WebGUI business owners and I have been discussing my strategy for WebGUI as a product. One part of that strategy has always been a breadth-first approach to adding features. In other words, let's get a wide swath of major systems added into WebGUI, and then let users, through their experiences, tell us all the little details that should be added to make it even better. For example, we added a wiki feature several revs ago, and it was just a basic wiki. Certainly nothing to compete with MediaWiki and the like. Since then the RFE's have been piling up and we've added quite a few, most recently comments.
In taking a breadth-first approach, it's sometimes easy to get swept up and think that every feature is a good idea. It's not. There are some things that are just not right for our product direction, and then there are some things that should just never be done by anybody, ever. For example, I've been asked several times whether we plan to build in word processing or spreadsheet applications. Another I get asked about quite frequently is whether I plan to build an accounting system/ledger into WebGUI. While those are certainly nice features, they don't fit with WebGUI's direction as a product. WebGUI lives two lives, one as an enterprise content management system, and one as a web application framework.
As a web application framework, we need to provide a rich set of API's so that if someone decided they wanted to build those things, they certainly could. But our goal in this case is to provide tools, not build the house.
As a CMS WebGUI needs to focus on the various types of content publishing, community, and commerce applications that are needed to run a successful web site. We occasionally slip in a few intranet related features that are things we can use internally, and therefore we think other people could probably use as well.
Our goal isn't to build every application under the sun. Our goal is to be the glue that fills in all the gaps, and binds everything else together. And that's why WebGUI doesn't need every feature.
|
User:
titlandata
Date: 1/29/2009 12:43 am |
Rating: -20
Rate [
Status: Archived |
Greetings,
having used webgui for several years and gotten a good understanding of the workings, I have to say that the aproach of providing a stable and well documented API should be the key focus here.
As you stated yourself, you can't build every possible feature into WebGUI cause those will keep on comming! BUT you can, as you have already done, build a very solid foundation, in the form of an API and documentation, on which to enable the user to build new features for himself.
Because of WebGUI's api (and ofc that it is written in perl), I can't see myself switching to another content management system. I mean webgui is so much more than a cms, its a whole freaking system that you can build upon to make your own ideas for the web, come to life.
WebGUI imo. should sell itself more by being a meta-cms (the mother of all cms systems). Sure the other cms systems and vendors that sell cms systems in general, print page up and page down what their systems can do feature wise. I agree it looks good with the marketing glasses on, but quite frankly its the API that in the end makes a cms able to evolve to house every feature concievable to man.
Other cms features:
* list of thousand things
*
* ...
Web gui features:
* list of 1 thing. Whatever you need.
Best regards and thanks for a fantastic MCMS.
