Mindfly Website Design Studio

Yesterday, Lisa Spangenberg posted a comment on The Benefits of a Content Management System (CMS) making a very good point that Mindfly Web Design Studio has not adequately differentiated Boogaloo from several other applications.

Lisa specifically mentioned TextPattern, Joomla, Drupal and WordPress in her comment.  I will try to address each of the ones that I can as non-biased as possible.

I should start by giving a few disclaimers.

1. I do not profess to be proficient with PHP and plan on happily retiring without ever becoming so
2. My proficiency is in ASP.NET and MS SQL Server and amongst my contemporaries, I am part of the minority that prefers to program in VB.NET over C#.
3. I have absolutely no experience with TextPattern and will limit my comments to saying it looks cool and I now plan on playing around with it a bit.

With those being stated, I'll start by answering Lisa's final question, "What makes it better for the end-user than, say, WordPress?" First with the web designers' favorite response ... Well, that depends.

WordPress and to some extent Joomla and Drupal are setup for a layman to download, install and click buttons to select a template and start adding content.  They look at the end user as the person entering the content first and the designer second.

Boogaloo is intended to be a tool for a web designer. Out of the box, Boogaloo provides a plethora of tools to rapidly get raw (not formatted) content onto a page from almost any source the designer can access.  It is then up to the designer to apply visual styling and any interactive effects to the raw content. The end user for Boogaloo (initially) is the web designer.

In my previous post Boogaloo - Mindfly Web Design Studio's Open Source Debut, I tried to point this out when I wrote:
"Ironically, I do not think of what we produced as a traditional content management system, rather I consider it to be more of a "site creation framework";  Something more analogous to a server side JQuery if there were such a category.  After all, a successful installation simply renders a blank page."

Only over the course of the website build does Boogaloo morph into a CMS as content holders get filled with different controls - galleries, articles, ads, maps, feeds etc.  This may seem inside out compared to a more traditional CMS approach, yet in practice you wind up with a very intuitive administrative interface for the designers' customers which gives them the ability to edit essentially every aspect of the the Boogaloo controled section of their website. I make this emphasis due to the fact that a typical website is quite often comprised of many different applications.

If a customer walked into the studio and said they wanted a blog, we would definitely point them in the direction of BlogEngine.net or WordPress.  While Boogaloo does have quite a few blog technologies built into it (a ping service handler, pingbacks, trackbacks and RSS), WordPress would probably serve the client better as it is a blog first and foremost and the right tool for the job.

If that same customer walked in and said I have several blogs, an eCommerce store and wanted to connect everything together through a single application I would choose Boogaloo.  Referenced blogs post would be read in via feeds, store items would be queried via API (or direct database calls), etc.

Another BIG difference between any of the fore mentioned applications and Boogaloo is that Boogaloo is completely written using Microsoft's .NET framework and MS SQL Server and gets deployed to a web server running IIS 6.0 or IIS 7.0 rather than a PHP application with a MySQL back end generally hosted on an Apache web server.  If you look around, when compared to the number of PHP CMSs there are relatively few counterparts (meant for small business and personal web sites) written in ASP.NET.  And out of the few that there are, even fewer give the designer enough control over the HTML to semantically represent the underlying content, create any layout and assert that the layout(s) validates.

So I guess to directly answer Lisa, in a way it is like comparing apples to oranges. Boogaloo starts with a blank page and allows the web designer to almost immediately start adding raw content that can be easily styled without deconstructing anything.  In the end the person responsible for maintaining the site can edit nearly everything through the various controls that have been added or through an extension.  Boogaloo is a ASP.NET application which is engineered to encourage other developers to create custom controls and extensions in either VB.NET, C# or anything else for that matter that they can get to run in the App_Code folder compile on demand. Boogaloo is a site creation framework first with that becomes a CMS in the end.

A little more than three years ago I began outlining a Content Management System (CMS) based on the needs of my business, Mindfly Web Design Studio.  I spent the first two years and quite a few weekends , coding nearly every night and came up with an initial version.  Once completed, the studio began doing some internal and external usability studies and has spent the better part of a year completely reworking the interface.  The studio staff overwhelmingly decided to name it Boogaloo and I am very pleased to announce its open source debut on Codeplex.

My motivation to write Boogaloo was not without hesitation.  In 2006, I had decided to attempt a transition from a "shop", mainly known locally for its server side and database programming, into a "studio" that placed a much heavier emphasis on Web Design and seriously focused on producing web sites that validate and conform to Web Standards.  Even in retrospect, this maneuver turned out to be one of the best decisions I have ever made. 

Mindfly's clientele mainly consists of small businesses and we often deal with people who find themselves too busy to learn how a website functions and frankly many of them, rightfully, don't care.  We hear the phrase "I don't care how it works, I just want it to work" so often we could consider it a mantra.

In addition, aside from a small percentage of small business owners, there is very little inherent appreciation to the amount of work and often how much technical expertise is actually required to create certain site functionality.  When defining a project scope, "That's pretty easy, right?" is another phrase we hear nine out of ten times and is a literal testament of that fact. 

Therefore, the change in emphasis was simply having a better understanding of our current and potential customers.  However, the transition, was fraught with challenges and it quickly became obvious that we needed to either spend a great deal of time updating our in house CMS or select an open source (or inexpensive)CMS written in ASP.NET, which three years ago relative to php systems, were in short supply. 

In 2006, I personally found it impossible to find an ASP.NET CMS that met the following criteria:

1. Quick for the front end designer to learn
2. Capable of producing non table based designs
3. Gives the visual designer the freedom to literally conceptualize and create any design
4. Provides the front end designer with absolute control over the underlying HTML in order implement the design with semantic markup.

Initially I reviewed DotNetNuke, Community Server and Umbraco and made a pros and cons list.  I played with DNN the most, and I did not care much for Community Server albeit many people love it.  I probably did not spend enough time looking through the ins and outs of Umbraco but quickly came to the notably incorrect conclusion that repetitive customer service calls from non technical customers would increase significantly and admit I was extremely nervy about that possibility after discontinuing our hosting services.

That being said, I would say that each of these projects were extremely influential.  Other project muses include BlogEngine.NET and Argotic, both written by insanely talented programmers.

Ironically, I do not think of what we produced as a traditional content management system, rather I consider it to be more of a "site creation framework";  Something more analogous to a server side JQuery if there were such a category.  After all, a successful installation simply renders a blank page.

There has been quite a bit of discussion as to whether or not "a blank page" was the appropriate way to debut our project, but our conclusion has thus far been that once one gets used to using the application, having to delete the default website for every single installation would really become more of an obstacle rather than a feature.

The studio is currently moving full steam ahead with its efforts to better document Boogaloo via wiki, articles, and videos.  We look forward to the discussions, comments and constructive criticisms.