Mindfly Website Design Studio

Bellingham, WA, December 10, 2009 – Mindfly Web Design Studio recently released Boogaloo, an open source customizable site creation framework and content management system (CMS). Unlike other site creation frameworks, Boogaloo allows the designer to control almost every aspect of the HTML and CSS, page by page.

In 2006, Mindfly co-founder and owner Rusty Swayne began the search for a CMS that would fulfill the diverse needs of both Mindfly Web Design Studio staff and their clients. After reviewing a variety of existing content management systems that did not satisfy all of his requirements, Swayne and the Mindfly team spent the next three years developing Boogaloo.

“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.’ After all, a successful installation of Boogaloo simply renders a blank page,” Swayne explained.

The benefits of using Boogaloo to build your website include:

• Ability to produce standards-compliant websites in ASP.NET
• Freedom to conceptualize and create any design within the framework
• Absolute control over underlying HTML and semantic markup for the front-end designer
• Rapid implementation of any design alterations to a single page or every page on a site
• Easy for both front-end designers and clients to learn and use

Boogaloo makes producing standards-compliant websites a breeze for web designers, web developers and engineers, and clients.

For a free download, visit Boogaloo from Codeplex. Updated versions of Boogaloo and documentation are currently in progress. Boogaloo users are invited to join the Discussion to ask questions and offer comments.

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.