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.
