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.
- I do not profess to be proficient with PHP and plan on happily retiring without ever becoming so
- 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#.
- 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.
There are many articles out there outlining the benefits of using a CMS and this one will probably be quite similar, but since we here at Mindfly have recently launched our own CMS called Boogaloo, I thought I'd tell you why you should think they're as fabulous as we do.
- The obvious benefit of a content management system such as Boogaloo is that you can add, edit, update your content as much as you want. No need to bring in any outside help, no need to know HTML or other languages. No need wait on someone else's timing. It's got a graphical interface that allows you to add text, links, lists, images – pretty much anything you want. You'll also end up saving yourself some money in the long run by updating the site yourself instead of paying someone else to do it (though we'd be more than happy to do them for you in a snappy manner anyway!).
- Another great aspect of Boogaloo is the flexibility. Sites can broken down into three parts: design, structure, and content. Each section can be tweaked or adjusted independently of each other. A new design can be implemented without having to adjust the structure or content. Or the structure could be adjusted to add new features or improve the usability and functionality without any changes to the design or content. As websites typically have a shelf-life of two to three years before they start looking dated and neglected, being able to reskin it (or make a new template) versus throwing the whole thing out and starting over can significantly help to reduce costs as you are allowing your site to evolve over time.
- Content management systems also typically allow you to configure access restrictions by creating different roles for the people you may have editing your site. Typically admin roles have access to everything, whereas an editor role might have more limited access and lack the ability to delete. Boogaloo does not come with this feature out of the box, but we could do it upon request.
- The menu structures are dynamic. Whenever a new page is added it magically appears in your menu. The reverse applies as well: if you delete a page, it is removed from the menu. No need to add a link to the menu of every single page as was done in the old days (and actually probably still being done on some sites today!). Dynamic menus save time and reduce coding errors (I am notorious for messing up at least one internal menu link per site if I have to add them manually).
- Updating the site is so easy it encourages faster, more frequent updates (which search engines love!).
- Boogaloo sites are set up in such a way that makes it hard for you to "break." Since we designers put all the code where you can't see it, all you have to worry about is your own content making both our lives easier and less stressful!
The creation of Boogaloo was two-fold. We needed an ASP.NET CMS that was quick and easy for designers to learn and implement the design of their choosing with absolute control of the underlying HTML and it needed to be easy and intuitive for our clients to navigate and use. It's still a work in progress, as all things of this nature are, but it's still pretty super swank, if I do say so myself. So ask yourself this when you're considering a new site: is Boogaloo the way to go for me? In most cases, I would probably tell you yes!
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:
- Quick for the front end designer to learn
- Capable of producing non table based designs
- Gives the visual designer the freedom to literally conceptualize and create any design
- 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.
