I did something similiar while reading POET. The link in the url field I call an "anolital" clock. It shows both relative time and allows for both hour and minutes without major saccading.
Jay
· 6 years ago
I believe you would have to add Albert Lee as a usability consultant who has extensive experience with usability at RIM, IBM
I donot have his website info but know of him
David Gammel
· 6 years ago
We're in the process of deploying eWebEditPro from Ektron. Too early to give it a review but based on spec it looks like the best one out there for generating valid code.
Glen Engel-Cox
· 6 years ago
eWebEditPro requires a PC (i.e., no Apple, no Linux), I believe because it links to Windows DLLs.
Eric
· 6 years ago
I'd be interested in anyone's findings with regards to CF based CMS solutions above the $5,000 ceiling imposed here. If price isn't an issue, are there any more feature-rich tools out there for CF developers? Thanks in advance...
Jeff Rhys-Jones
· 6 years ago
Hey thanks for considering us!
Cheers from London,
Jeff
Jeff Rhys-Jones
Technical Director, Emojo Ltd.
p.s. it is 'Emojo', not 'eMojo'!
Jeff Rhys-Jones
· 6 years ago
Urrk!
Thanks for the change, we're so very nearly there! 'eMojo' has now been changed to 'EMojo'. What we'd really like is 'Emojo'!!
Now I know I'm probably pushing my luck with this, but - well, I thought that it was worth a shot.
By the way, if you have the spare time, we have a handy item on Emojo.com which helps one know how to pronounce the words 'Emojo' and 'Affino' and also explains why they are what they are! The link to the item is here...
Thanks Jeff for correcting my mis-capitalization of Emojo. Hopefully, I will get it correct at some point.
David Crow
· 6 years ago
I came across an additional ColdFusion based CMS today in a random search, and they aren't very far from me in Toronto. HotBanana [ http://www.hotbanana.ca/ ] located in Barrie, ON is a CF-based solution.
Darrell Johnson
· 6 years ago
David, your post has been invaluable. thanks
We are just starting the search for a CFMX based Content system for our company. I'll keep you all up to date as our choices narrow. We do need a system with some installed base and a strong support model.
Geoff Bowers
· 6 years ago
Only just stumbled across your post -- thanks for the vote of support. I think it's worth noting that FarCry use to be a commercial solution we sold locally for about 15-20kUS per server. It took a lot of courage to open source the code base and turn the company around to have a purely service driven focus. The response from developers and new clients has been great -- but the best evidence of that is the range of new sites being built using FarCry technology. Hope to see you on the farcry-dev mailing list :)
Robin Hilliard
· 6 years ago
Thanks for including Speck in your survey. The great thing is that there is a whole Spectrum of CMS solutions out there using Macromedia technology - starting with Contribute, then solutions like Speck for your traditional CF tag scripting people, and then frameworks that make the most of CFCs such as FarCry and Shado.
Regarding HTML editors for CMS, do not underestimate the need for a spell checker! ActiveEdit (<a href="http://www.cfdev.com) " target="_blank">http://www.cfdev.com) is a good HTML editor that has an integrated server side spell checker.
Evelyn So
· 6 years ago
To find the closest branch of any store, I look at (a)the address (b)the map i.e. that little helpful tool readily available via mapquest, yahoo! maps, scanned map images, or even doodling on a napkin.
I have never taken out a map and draw a linear line between A and B. Because I don't know how to....FLY? Am I still qualified to shop at Sears?
Alex Aguilar
· 6 years ago
Thanks for the excellent compilation of Coldfusion CMSs.
As for a good cross-platform HTML-area replacement. I use Editize.
Works great on Macs running Safari.
If I know the client is Windows/ie centric then I recommend SiteObjects Editor.
Angelo Gregoriou
· 6 years ago
Please free to visit <a href="http://www.easyconsole.com.
This is a very useful article for those who are entering into a CMS procurement process and are considering a ColdFusion based solution.
We have worked with both PaperThin's CommonSpot and with NetQuest's NQContent. They are both very solid products, each addressing different parts of the user spectrum. CommonSpot is very robust wrt process management, segregation of sub-sites (eg, business divisions), granular authoring and control, personalization, and extensibility.
NQContent's current version is built around a concept of Articles, and thus currently has a more rigid concept of "content". It does have a very easy to customize architecture, a strong workflow system, an intuitive admin interface, useful add-on modules, and a solid security framework. Another important feature of NQContent is that it is extremely strong in the area of rapid application development. The product provides a GUI interface directly into your database where by one can manipulated the schema (ie, modify the tables), enter data, and extract data for use in pages. This element of the product could potentially save you thousands in custom development costs -- not to be overlooked.
Its not 100% accurate, but I would characterize CommonSpot as a business/process solution and NQContent as more of business/technical solution.
Both of these products run on and take advantage of the new features in CFMX. Both of these products are due for a new major release in the next 2-4 months.
Hopefully this is helpful. You can also track more general CMS information at <a href="http://www.cmswire.com " target="_blank"><a href="http://www.cmswire.com" target="_blank">www.cmswire.com .
Gobo
· 6 years ago
David,
It would be interesting to know your experiences with FarCry to this point. I'm considering implementing it for a client, but it's taking a while to understand what's going on internally with the software.
--Thanks,
Dave Bloch
· 6 years ago
We've been using Emojo's Affino CMS for about 15 months now, and I'm an unabashed fan. Be sure you look carefully at what it takes to create the page templates; Affino has a GUI (the "Design Centre") that really works well. Training non-technical staff to do at least basic content editing is easy. Lots of features built in that other systems require you buy other applications. Check out the site; I do that one (along with our Intranet site and 3 others on the same server) -- and I'm a one-person shop.
Jose Hernandez
· 6 years ago
I love this page...
I work for the University of California at Santa Cruz in the student affairs dept. http://studentaffairs.ucsc.edu We are currently looking for a scalable CMS for our department and the units we support. As far as a real-world example, we have almost every OS and browser to support on both the content-creation end and the receiving end. We have no money thanks to the politicians. We have dozens of existing CF forms and applications that we simply cannot live without. We also want to help academic departments and student media implement their own CMS solutions, who all have their own servers, OS's, webservers, databases, and staff. Its a bloody mess- just look at the UCSC site and you'll see thousands of pages that look like they have nothing to do with eachother.
One day I'll graduate but for now this is my mess. I'm looking for something super robust and scalable and simple to help maintain a consistent look and feel for my campus, or at least a branch of it. FarCry looks like the solution we are going to adapt. We have also considered a slough of LAMP solutions, in the open spirit, but everything I've seen so far looks too complicated for my likings - I don't want to learn linux or zope or any new languages this year, ColdFusion is enough for now.
Any suggestions from y'all? Any foreseeable brick walls with FarCry?
David Crow
· 6 years ago
I had to put our content management project on hold for a couple of months. I needed to reallocate my team resource to put out some additional fires.
The project is set to relaunch on November 17. I'll post my progress.
The FarCry solution is very page based. The templates are fairly easy to set up and configure. My biggest complaint is the search capabilities and the lack of a thesaurus. Version control is great.
Ian Van Audenhaege
· 6 years ago
It is my understanding that FarCry is moving to the UNIX platform... I think this is very important since CF is going in the same direction.
Dimitris Siskopoulos
· 6 years ago
Our second and "lighter" CMS is EasyNews. It's major feature is that it the content can appear on ANY server, even free servers.
can anyone recommend a good host for Farcry? Please email me if you do.
Regards
Lee
Jodeo
· 5 years ago
I'm looking for a CHEAP (free?), simple TextArea replacement tag for ColdFusion that will allow the user to input their page content/copy with formatting (B/I/U, etc), possibly upload images, and post to datasources (such as Access. Yeah, I know... "Access? Crimony!"). It's a simple, low-budget project.
Being Mac-platform friendly is strongly desired but not essential.
Thanks.
David Crow
· 5 years ago
I started using Editize for my content editor. It works okay, we are having some issues getting it to work well with MozillaFirebird but it seems to work for Safari 1.0 on Mac OS X.3.
David Brannan
· 5 years ago
Please check out our CMS. It is called StoryCMS v2.1 and under our product section.
My understanding is that eWebEditPro can be configured to produce strict XHTML with the simple setting of an attribute. I used this in a few CMS projects, but to be honest, the published web sites had no real requirement for XHTML so the adherence to the standard never really got tested. Overall, despite having no affiliation with Ektron, I found the eWebEditPro product pretty robust (for WYSIWYG editing), easy-to-implement and easy-to-use.
Michael Sherer
· 5 years ago
If you're interested in an Open Source/Freeware solution, you might check out the Caravel project. It supports multi-platform editing, is the closest to WYSIWYG editing in a CMS that I've seen, scales to thousands of sites, integrates withe LDAP, lets you create, display and post to RSS channels, let's you dynamically create personal sites just by authenticating to the enterprise directory, etc.
It's written in PHP, website metadata is stored as LDAP objects (a very cool and powerful back-end architecture), runs on Linux, OpenLDAP and Apache, but conceivably could be totally platform independent.
I'm biased since I'm the project manager, but it's a pretty exciting project that's just going public. We're also looking to start a technology development co-op for vertical market applications. See <a href="http://co-op.caravelcms.org
eWebEditPro is okay, but it requires a PC running IE. Since I develop primarly using a Mac running OS X, it limits my user base.
I have been using Editize very successfully (we had a minor issue with the code base on MozillaFirebird, but it was an error with the production server having an older version of the code). It works really well, though sometimes the xhtml support is not as far along as I would like it.
Dimitris Siskopoulos
· 5 years ago
This is the second CMS from our company (www.weblogic.gr). It is the only CMS that can show it's content to ANY site, even if it does not support Coldfusion (or any other scripting languages) and databases...
David, thank you for post about Hot Banana in August 2003.
Hot Banana 5 has just been launched and it is the most cost-effective, easy-to-use, yet feature rich Web Content Management systems on the market today. HereÃs a link to the site: <a href="http://www.hotbanana.com. " target="_blank"><a href="http://www.hotbanana.com." target="_blank">www.hotbanana.com. ItÃs built on the ColdFusion MX platform. I invite you to take the product tour: <a href="http://hotbanana.com/hot-banana-tour/. " target="_blank"><a href="http://hotbanana.com/hot-banana-tour/." target="_blank">http://hotbanana.com/hot-banana-tour/.
From your posts, I see that XHTML, CSS and accessibility compliance are priorities for you. The Hot Banana team has worked very hard to make Hot Banana compliant. Currently we are working on converting some of our customersà web site designs into W3C compliant sites. If you would like to learn more about how we accomplished this task and where Hot Banana is headed in the future, please contact me.
Thank you,
Chris Adams, Hot Banana Product Manager
David White
· 5 years ago
Curious how Macromedias Contribute CMS will hold water against FarCry and SparkPlug?
Any feedback regarding your experiences with these packages would be greatley appreciated.
Randy Charles Morin
· 5 years ago
Opencola (dev mgr), 724 Solutions (dev mgr), RIMM, OpenText, 1X Inc. (CA), Lemontonic (lead), Lavalife, Omniterm (lead), Dude Research (director), etc.
Mostly companies that I helped start and a few extras.
Remember also Winfax/Delrina and everything spawn from their, like TiraWireless.
David Crow
· 5 years ago
I remember WinFax/Delrina, wow, that was a long time ago. I did some usability evaluations of one of their products as a student intern in 1995.
I thought that TiraWireless was a BlueSpark company. And LavaLife, a different focus, but still a software solution. OpenText, RIM are both Waterloo companies aren't they. But there's Hummingbird and some others.
I wonder what information I should capture about Toronto companies:
<ul><li>name</li><li>year started</li><li>number of employees</li><li>address</li><li>industry sector</li><li>uri</li><li>public/private</li></ul>
Gary Will provides a great service, Waterloo TECH Digest, maybe grabbing RSS and news stories about the companies listed would be useful too. Kind of a Technorati or Blogdex for Toronto software companies.
Brandon
· 5 years ago
I am looking at ActiveWeb 3.0 and FarCry. Does anyone have any knowledge about ActiveWeb 3.0 by Lomtec?? (<a href="http://www.lomtec.com)
It is CF-based and only $2,950. Sounds good but I would like some feedback as I try to compare.
Nathan Shaw
· 5 years ago
Anyone have experience with SparkPlug? The feature set and price tag look pretty good for most of our client's needs. Just wondering if anyone is actually using it and what they think of it.
Thanks,
--Nate
Daniel Ponech
· 4 years ago
Dude, I feel your pain, I really do. You see, there was this thing, the Canadian Usability Summit Society, dedicated to addressing the very issues you raise. More than just usability, it was an organisation that aspired to be an open forum that helped break through the barriers that divided the fragmented, competitive user experience community in Toronto and beyond. It wanted to help move the community of which you speak beyond its current "Lord of the Flies" state into something, well, better. Alas, CUSS fell on hard times and we're left with things the way you describe.
Still, I got nuthin' but love for ya, baby
Dmitry Nekrasovski
· 4 years ago
I think this is a fantastic idea. Here in Vancouver, the SIGCHI chapter died for lack of interest and relevance, but there is now a non-denominational organization called VanUE (<a href="http://www.vanue.com) " target="_blank"><a href="http://www.vanue.com)" target="_blank">http://www.vanue.com) that seems to try to be more inclusive. It's mainly a forum for presentations, though, and meeting people is difficult.
I also noticed that all the "new communities" you mention are primarily virtual - could this have something to do with their non-competitive nature?
Matthew Milan
· 4 years ago
At an emotional level, I really like the idea of a Canadian UX-ish practitioner organization. That being said, I do have concerns as to how much utility another UX organization would bring. From the perspective of someone who's only become involved in UX in the last two years, my initial take on the Canadian (and Toronto) UX community was that it was pretty much non-existent. I realize now that's not the case, but I think my initial observation does open some interesting questions, including one that I consider to be rather important; namely what kind(s)of roles need to be filled by a UX community organization with a Canadian angle for it to be relevant both internally to its members and externally as a front for a community of practice?
Your suggestion that organizations like AIfIA (soon to be IAI) seem have it right is bang-on in my opinion. As a member, you feel that IAI is working to support you on a whole bunch of different levels.
What similar 'support' would entail in a Canadian context needs to be well defined, or at least better understood. For a Canada-centric UX organization to be successful it would have to provide some kind of added value above and beyond more generalized UX organizations and their local chapters. The discussion you and Jess had was very enlightening for me, but on relection it made me feel that the Canadian UX community is in a state of disconnect.
I haven't really thought about a Canadian perspective on UX up to this point, but your post makes me feel that it's relevant, and neglected. Maybe a Canadian UX organzation wouldn't appeal to all UX professionals in Canada, but an organization doesn't have to have to be everything to everyone to be relevant. I'd personally settle for an organization that understands and realizes its mission, even on a very small scale.
nkosi
· 4 years ago
As you have switched off your comments function for earlier posts, I am posting here.
Regarding your CF CMS research in mid 2003. Has Farcry satisfied your requirements? or do you wish you had chosen one of the other products??
Cheers
Kevin Cheng
· 4 years ago
Wow, we must be really lacking for Canadian experts for my name to be there ;)
Keep me in the loop on this. I'm not in the country (or continent) until June but after that, I may be there a fair amount of time and could perhaps help on the west coast.
Donald Swain
· 4 years ago
I enjoy your site very much.
Tanya
· 4 years ago
Hi David,
Wondering if you’d like to chat about some opportunities with Blast Radius?
Thanks,
Tanya S.
Recruitment Specialist
B. Naked
· 4 years ago
You sir, are a change catalyst.
Plus, you have nice shoes.
Cloves Carneiro Jr
· 3 years ago
It's nice to see that a lot of people will be coming out tomorrow. FYI, Outmailer is our Web 2.0 approach to email marketing. I and Jeffrey Hardy & http://www.quotedprintable.com/ & have been working on it for the last couple of months. See you tomorrow.
Estelle
· 3 years ago
Re Semacode and Bruce Sterling, I think you have a typo on your postiing today, they are spimes, not splimes.
See you tomorrow night
John Philip Green
· 3 years ago
Malgosia & I will see you there. What's the plan for drinks afterwards?
David Crow
· 3 years ago
The plan for post DemoCamp drinks is to go to Pogue Mahones at 777 Bay Street.
Jevon
· 3 years ago
It's actually on College St. If you look up across the street, on you may see a cat sitting on a desk. That would be my place, and my desk. ;-)
Once again, I can't be there. Which sucks, because you will all be close by this time!
Mike McDerment
· 3 years ago
David, great to see you and thanks again for making it happen.by the way the wiki actually made it to 150 attendees.just awesome.
Farhan Thawar
· 3 years ago
I guess you don't count my MSN search plugin (<a href="http://mycroft.mozdev.org/quick/msn.html) " target="_blank"><a href="http://mycroft.mozdev.org/quick/msn.html)" target="_blank">http://mycroft.mozdev.org/quick/msn.html) as Firefox dev? I'm still in the 416 dude...
You could have come out to BarCampTdot and talked to the Mozilla guys and informed the RadiantCore gang about all of the pitfalls. We need to get you out to these events more regularly.
Finally, we are able to let the cat out-of-the-bag. It has been killing us @ the Loft not to talk about Dragons' Den in great detail as we signed an NDA. Most people didn't believe us when we told them that we didn't know the outcome...
Lynda Chiotti
· 2 years ago
I'm just back from UPA2007 in Austin, where Bill Buxton did a great keynote. Everything old is new in interesting ways. Bill started with Renaissance warship sketches. Can't wait to get into his book!
Vera Bass
· 2 years ago
“The value of failure isn't the failure itself. It's a culture that allows you to fail, and requires you to reflect and investigate the causes of the failure and to make the changes necessary to not repeat them.”
True. I’d add that, for me, the changes we see in ourselves as a direct result of accepting and then getting right back up to try again, can be the most valuable thing of all.
Vera
Joe Clark
· 2 years ago
This sounds like an excellent time for you to quit.
Hannah
· 2 years ago
The older (and more experience) I get, my belief is that corporate cultures that strive for excellence and yet accommodate occasional failure give their teams permission to innovate without fear of reprisal. It produces stronger results in the end because it allows people to be creative. What a concept.
sean r moffitt
· 2 years ago
David,
Thanks for the tout. To be clear, the rankings on the list so far are draft & we'll randomly seed next week when we have our full 128 bloggers in place and the first round will have 4 blogs run off against each other with one winner.
I caught the note about Jevon's blog-let me know if you run across any others.
Cheers,
Sean
Colin Smillie
· 2 years ago
I hate that Cisco campaign, nothing like using a fairly mass media for a products that have a fairly small customer target. The trail between the video to the website to Cisco is also pretty long.
At least the Nokia phone is a relatively mass market product.
Internet Marketing B
· 2 years ago
Very insightful video David!
Daniel Shapiro
· 1 year ago
Hey Dave, Just wanted to let your readers know that they should let us know if they plan to be in Vegas. We'll be throwing some parties and Canadian gatherings. Let us know by emailing me or anyone on our team. daniel dot shapiro at microsoft dot com.. We'll make sure you hear about where the Canadians will be.
All Comments
I did something similiar while reading POET. The link in the url field I call an "anolital" clock. It shows both relative time and allows for both hour and minutes without major saccading.
I believe you would have to add Albert Lee as a usability consultant who has extensive experience with usability at RIM, IBM
I donot have his website info but know of him
We're in the process of deploying eWebEditPro from Ektron. Too early to give it a review but based on spec it looks like the best one out there for generating valid code.
eWebEditPro requires a PC (i.e., no Apple, no Linux), I believe because it links to Windows DLLs.
I'd be interested in anyone's findings with regards to CF based CMS solutions above the $5,000 ceiling imposed here. If price isn't an issue, are there any more feature-rich tools out there for CF developers? Thanks in advance...
Hey thanks for considering us!
Cheers from London,
Jeff
Jeff Rhys-Jones
Technical Director, Emojo Ltd.
p.s. it is 'Emojo', not 'eMojo'!
Urrk!
Thanks for the change, we're so very nearly there! 'eMojo' has now been changed to 'EMojo'. What we'd really like is 'Emojo'!!
Now I know I'm probably pushing my luck with this, but - well, I thought that it was worth a shot.
By the way, if you have the spare time, we have a handy item on Emojo.com which helps one know how to pronounce the words 'Emojo' and 'Affino' and also explains why they are what they are! The link to the item is here...
<a href="http://www.emojo.com/About/Index.cfm?ccs...
" target="_blank"><a href="http://www.emojo.com/About/Index.cfm?ccs=83&c..." target="_blank">http://www.emojo.com/About/Index.cfm?ccs=83&c...
Anyway, keep up the good work!
Cheers,
Jeff
Thanks Jeff for correcting my mis-capitalization of Emojo. Hopefully, I will get it correct at some point.
I came across an additional ColdFusion based CMS today in a random search, and they aren't very far from me in Toronto. HotBanana [ http://www.hotbanana.ca/ ] located in Barrie, ON is a CF-based solution.
David, your post has been invaluable. thanks
We are just starting the search for a CFMX based Content system for our company. I'll keep you all up to date as our choices narrow. We do need a system with some installed base and a strong support model.
Only just stumbled across your post -- thanks for the vote of support. I think it's worth noting that FarCry use to be a commercial solution we sold locally for about 15-20kUS per server. It took a lot of courage to open source the code base and turn the company around to have a purely service driven focus. The response from developers and new clients has been great -- but the best evidence of that is the range of new sites being built using FarCry technology. Hope to see you on the farcry-dev mailing list :)
Thanks for including Speck in your survey. The great thing is that there is a whole Spectrum of CMS solutions out there using Macromedia technology - starting with Contribute, then solutions like Speck for your traditional CF tag scripting people, and then frameworks that make the most of CFCs such as FarCry and Shado.
Please check out our CMS too:
" target="_blank"><a href="http://www.e-publish.gr/setlang.cfm?lang=uk" target="_blank">http://www.e-publish.gr/setlang.cfm?lang=uk<a href="http://www.e-publish.gr/setlang.cfm?lang=uk
You may also want to consider AssetNow (<a href="http://www.assetnow.com). " target="_blank">http://www.assetnow.com). It works very well for me and the pro version has one of the best HTML editors I've seen.
Regarding HTML editors for CMS, do not underestimate the need for a spell checker! ActiveEdit (<a href="http://www.cfdev.com) " target="_blank">http://www.cfdev.com) is a good HTML editor that has an integrated server side spell checker.
To find the closest branch of any store, I look at (a)the address (b)the map i.e. that little helpful tool readily available via mapquest, yahoo! maps, scanned map images, or even doodling on a napkin.
I have never taken out a map and draw a linear line between A and B. Because I don't know how to....FLY? Am I still qualified to shop at Sears?
Thanks for the excellent compilation of Coldfusion CMSs.
As for a good cross-platform HTML-area replacement. I use Editize.
Works great on Macs running Safari.
If I know the client is Windows/ie centric then I recommend SiteObjects Editor.
Please free to visit <a href="http://www.easyconsole.com.
" target="_blank">www.easyconsole.com. A very interesting CFMX-based CMS.
This is a very useful article for those who are entering into a CMS procurement process and are considering a ColdFusion based solution.
We have worked with both PaperThin's CommonSpot and with NetQuest's NQContent. They are both very solid products, each addressing different parts of the user spectrum. CommonSpot is very robust wrt process management, segregation of sub-sites (eg, business divisions), granular authoring and control, personalization, and extensibility.
NQContent's current version is built around a concept of Articles, and thus currently has a more rigid concept of "content". It does have a very easy to customize architecture, a strong workflow system, an intuitive admin interface, useful add-on modules, and a solid security framework. Another important feature of NQContent is that it is extremely strong in the area of rapid application development. The product provides a GUI interface directly into your database where by one can manipulated the schema (ie, modify the tables), enter data, and extract data for use in pages. This element of the product could potentially save you thousands in custom development costs -- not to be overlooked.
Its not 100% accurate, but I would characterize CommonSpot as a business/process solution and NQContent as more of business/technical solution.
Both of these products run on and take advantage of the new features in CFMX. Both of these products are due for a new major release in the next 2-4 months.
Hopefully this is helpful. You can also track more general CMS information at <a href="http://www.cmswire.com " target="_blank"><a href="http://www.cmswire.com" target="_blank">www.cmswire.com .
David,
It would be interesting to know your experiences with FarCry to this point. I'm considering implementing it for a client, but it's taking a while to understand what's going on internally with the software.
--Thanks,
We've been using Emojo's Affino CMS for about 15 months now, and I'm an unabashed fan. Be sure you look carefully at what it takes to create the page templates; Affino has a GUI (the "Design Centre") that really works well. Training non-technical staff to do at least basic content editing is easy. Lots of features built in that other systems require you buy other applications. Check out the site; I do that one (along with our Intranet site and 3 others on the same server) -- and I'm a one-person shop.
I love this page...
I work for the University of California at Santa Cruz in the student affairs dept. http://studentaffairs.ucsc.edu We are currently looking for a scalable CMS for our department and the units we support. As far as a real-world example, we have almost every OS and browser to support on both the content-creation end and the receiving end. We have no money thanks to the politicians. We have dozens of existing CF forms and applications that we simply cannot live without. We also want to help academic departments and student media implement their own CMS solutions, who all have their own servers, OS's, webservers, databases, and staff. Its a bloody mess- just look at the UCSC site and you'll see thousands of pages that look like they have nothing to do with eachother.
One day I'll graduate but for now this is my mess. I'm looking for something super robust and scalable and simple to help maintain a consistent look and feel for my campus, or at least a branch of it. FarCry looks like the solution we are going to adapt. We have also considered a slough of LAMP solutions, in the open spirit, but everything I've seen so far looks too complicated for my likings - I don't want to learn linux or zope or any new languages this year, ColdFusion is enough for now.
Any suggestions from y'all? Any foreseeable brick walls with FarCry?
I had to put our content management project on hold for a couple of months. I needed to reallocate my team resource to put out some additional fires.
The project is set to relaunch on November 17. I'll post my progress.
The FarCry solution is very page based. The templates are fairly easy to set up and configure. My biggest complaint is the search capabilities and the lack of a thesaurus. Version control is great.
It is my understanding that FarCry is moving to the UNIX platform... I think this is very important since CF is going in the same direction.
Our second and "lighter" CMS is EasyNews. It's major feature is that it the content can appear on ANY server, even free servers.
Check out some REAL demos on free servers:
<a href="http://easynews0.tripod.com/
" target="_blank">http://easynews0.tripod.com/ <a href="http://www.geocities.com/easynewsdemo/
" target="_blank">http://www.geocities.com/easynewsdemo/
Hi,
can anyone recommend a good host for Farcry? Please email me if you do.
Regards
Lee
I'm looking for a CHEAP (free?), simple TextArea replacement tag for ColdFusion that will allow the user to input their page content/copy with formatting (B/I/U, etc), possibly upload images, and post to datasources (such as Access. Yeah, I know... "Access? Crimony!"). It's a simple, low-budget project.
Being Mac-platform friendly is strongly desired but not essential.
Thanks.
I started using Editize for my content editor. It works okay, we are having some issues getting it to work well with MozillaFirebird but it seems to work for Safari 1.0 on Mac OS X.3.
Please check out our CMS. It is called StoryCMS v2.1 and under our product section.
The URL to StoryCMS v2.1 is Raven Productions.
David --
My understanding is that eWebEditPro can be configured to produce strict XHTML with the simple setting of an attribute. I used this in a few CMS projects, but to be honest, the published web sites had no real requirement for XHTML so the adherence to the standard never really got tested. Overall, despite having no affiliation with Ektron, I found the eWebEditPro product pretty robust (for WYSIWYG editing), easy-to-implement and easy-to-use.
If you're interested in an Open Source/Freeware solution, you might check out the Caravel project. It supports multi-platform editing, is the closest to WYSIWYG editing in a CMS that I've seen, scales to thousands of sites, integrates withe LDAP, lets you create, display and post to RSS channels, let's you dynamically create personal sites just by authenticating to the enterprise directory, etc.
" target="_blank"><a href="http://co-op.caravelcms.org" target="_blank">http://co-op.caravelcms.orgIt's written in PHP, website metadata is stored as LDAP objects (a very cool and powerful back-end architecture), runs on Linux, OpenLDAP and Apache, but conceivably could be totally platform independent.
I'm biased since I'm the project manager, but it's a pretty exciting project that's just going public. We're also looking to start a technology development co-op for vertical market applications. See <a href="http://co-op.caravelcms.org
eWebEditPro is okay, but it requires a PC running IE. Since I develop primarly using a Mac running OS X, it limits my user base.
I have been using Editize very successfully (we had a minor issue with the code base on MozillaFirebird, but it was an error with the production server having an older version of the code). It works really well, though sometimes the xhtml support is not as far along as I would like it.
This is the second CMS from our company (www.weblogic.gr). It is the only CMS that can show it's content to ANY site, even if it does not support Coldfusion (or any other scripting languages) and databases...
" target="_blank"><a href="http://easynews0.tripod.com/" target="_blank">http://easynews0.tripod.com/Check out the demos on tripod.com
<a href="http://easynews0.tripod.com/
David, thank you for post about Hot Banana in August 2003.
Hot Banana 5 has just been launched and it is the most cost-effective, easy-to-use, yet feature rich Web Content Management systems on the market today. HereÃs a link to the site: <a href="http://www.hotbanana.com. " target="_blank"><a href="http://www.hotbanana.com." target="_blank">www.hotbanana.com. ItÃs built on the ColdFusion MX platform. I invite you to take the product tour: <a href="http://hotbanana.com/hot-banana-tour/. " target="_blank"><a href="http://hotbanana.com/hot-banana-tour/." target="_blank">http://hotbanana.com/hot-banana-tour/.
From your posts, I see that XHTML, CSS and accessibility compliance are priorities for you. The Hot Banana team has worked very hard to make Hot Banana compliant. Currently we are working on converting some of our customersà web site designs into W3C compliant sites. If you would like to learn more about how we accomplished this task and where Hot Banana is headed in the future, please contact me.
Thank you,
Chris Adams, Hot Banana Product Manager
Curious how Macromedias Contribute CMS will hold water against FarCry and SparkPlug?
Any feedback regarding your experiences with these packages would be greatley appreciated.
Opencola (dev mgr), 724 Solutions (dev mgr), RIMM, OpenText, 1X Inc. (CA), Lemontonic (lead), Lavalife, Omniterm (lead), Dude Research (director), etc.
Mostly companies that I helped start and a few extras.
Remember also Winfax/Delrina and everything spawn from their, like TiraWireless.
I remember WinFax/Delrina, wow, that was a long time ago. I did some usability evaluations of one of their products as a student intern in 1995.
I thought that TiraWireless was a BlueSpark company. And LavaLife, a different focus, but still a software solution. OpenText, RIM are both Waterloo companies aren't they. But there's Hummingbird and some others.
I wonder what information I should capture about Toronto companies:
<ul><li>name</li><li>year started</li><li>number of employees</li><li>address</li><li>industry sector</li><li>uri</li><li>public/private</li></ul>
Gary Will provides a great service, Waterloo TECH Digest, maybe grabbing RSS and news stories about the companies listed would be useful too. Kind of a Technorati or Blogdex for Toronto software companies.
I am looking at ActiveWeb 3.0 and FarCry. Does anyone have any knowledge about ActiveWeb 3.0 by Lomtec?? (<a href="http://www.lomtec.com)
" target="_blank">www.lomtec.com)
It is CF-based and only $2,950. Sounds good but I would like some feedback as I try to compare.
Anyone have experience with SparkPlug? The feature set and price tag look pretty good for most of our client's needs. Just wondering if anyone is actually using it and what they think of it.
Thanks,
--Nate
Dude, I feel your pain, I really do. You see, there was this thing, the Canadian Usability Summit Society, dedicated to addressing the very issues you raise. More than just usability, it was an organisation that aspired to be an open forum that helped break through the barriers that divided the fragmented, competitive user experience community in Toronto and beyond. It wanted to help move the community of which you speak beyond its current "Lord of the Flies" state into something, well, better. Alas, CUSS fell on hard times and we're left with things the way you describe.
Still, I got nuthin' but love for ya, baby
I think this is a fantastic idea. Here in Vancouver, the SIGCHI chapter died for lack of interest and relevance, but there is now a non-denominational organization called VanUE (<a href="http://www.vanue.com) " target="_blank"><a href="http://www.vanue.com)" target="_blank">http://www.vanue.com) that seems to try to be more inclusive. It's mainly a forum for presentations, though, and meeting people is difficult.
I also noticed that all the "new communities" you mention are primarily virtual - could this have something to do with their non-competitive nature?
At an emotional level, I really like the idea of a Canadian UX-ish practitioner organization. That being said, I do have concerns as to how much utility another UX organization would bring. From the perspective of someone who's only become involved in UX in the last two years, my initial take on the Canadian (and Toronto) UX community was that it was pretty much non-existent. I realize now that's not the case, but I think my initial observation does open some interesting questions, including one that I consider to be rather important; namely what kind(s)of roles need to be filled by a UX community organization with a Canadian angle for it to be relevant both internally to its members and externally as a front for a community of practice?
Your suggestion that organizations like AIfIA (soon to be IAI) seem have it right is bang-on in my opinion. As a member, you feel that IAI is working to support you on a whole bunch of different levels.
What similar 'support' would entail in a Canadian context needs to be well defined, or at least better understood. For a Canada-centric UX organization to be successful it would have to provide some kind of added value above and beyond more generalized UX organizations and their local chapters. The discussion you and Jess had was very enlightening for me, but on relection it made me feel that the Canadian UX community is in a state of disconnect.
I haven't really thought about a Canadian perspective on UX up to this point, but your post makes me feel that it's relevant, and neglected. Maybe a Canadian UX organzation wouldn't appeal to all UX professionals in Canada, but an organization doesn't have to have to be everything to everyone to be relevant. I'd personally settle for an organization that understands and realizes its mission, even on a very small scale.
As you have switched off your comments function for earlier posts, I am posting here.
Regarding your CF CMS research in mid 2003. Has Farcry satisfied your requirements? or do you wish you had chosen one of the other products??
Cheers
Wow, we must be really lacking for Canadian experts for my name to be there ;)
Keep me in the loop on this. I'm not in the country (or continent) until June but after that, I may be there a fair amount of time and could perhaps help on the west coast.
I enjoy your site very much.
Hi David,
Wondering if you’d like to chat about some opportunities with Blast Radius?
Thanks,
Tanya S.
Recruitment Specialist
You sir, are a change catalyst.
Plus, you have nice shoes.
It's nice to see that a lot of people will be coming out tomorrow. FYI, Outmailer is our Web 2.0 approach to email marketing. I and Jeffrey Hardy & http://www.quotedprintable.com/ & have been working on it for the last couple of months.
See you tomorrow.
Re Semacode and Bruce Sterling, I think you have a typo on your postiing today, they are spimes, not splimes.
See you tomorrow night
Malgosia & I will see you there. What's the plan for drinks afterwards?
The plan for post DemoCamp drinks is to go to Pogue Mahones at 777 Bay Street.
It's actually on College St. If you look up across the street, on you may see a cat sitting on a desk. That would be my place, and my desk. ;-)
Once again, I can't be there. Which sucks, because you will all be close by this time!
David, great to see you and thanks again for making it happen.by the way the wiki actually made it to 150 attendees.just awesome.
I guess you don't count my MSN search plugin (<a href="http://mycroft.mozdev.org/quick/msn.html) " target="_blank"><a href="http://mycroft.mozdev.org/quick/msn.html)" target="_blank">http://mycroft.mozdev.org/quick/msn.html) as Firefox dev? I'm still in the 416 dude...
Still in the 416 does not a TorCamper make.
You could have come out to BarCampTdot and talked to the Mozilla guys and informed the RadiantCore gang about all of the pitfalls. We need to get you out to these events more regularly.
JobLoft's Dragons' Den Story
Finally, we are able to let the cat out-of-the-bag. It has been killing us @ the Loft not to talk about Dragons' Den in great detail as we signed an NDA. Most people didn't believe us when we told them that we didn't know the outcome...
I'm just back from UPA2007 in Austin, where Bill Buxton did a great keynote. Everything old is new in interesting ways. Bill started with Renaissance warship sketches. Can't wait to get into his book!
“The value of failure isn't the failure itself. It's a culture that allows you to fail, and requires you to reflect and investigate the causes of the failure and to make the changes necessary to not repeat them.”
True. I’d add that, for me, the changes we see in ourselves as a direct result of accepting and then getting right back up to try again, can be the most valuable thing of all.
Vera
This sounds like an excellent time for you to quit.
The older (and more experience) I get, my belief is that corporate cultures that strive for excellence and yet accommodate occasional failure give their teams permission to innovate without fear of reprisal. It produces stronger results in the end because it allows people to be creative. What a concept.
David,
Thanks for the tout. To be clear, the rankings on the list so far are draft & we'll randomly seed next week when we have our full 128 bloggers in place and the first round will have 4 blogs run off against each other with one winner.
I caught the note about Jevon's blog-let me know if you run across any others.
Cheers,
Sean
I hate that Cisco campaign, nothing like using a fairly mass media for a products that have a fairly small customer target. The trail between the video to the website to Cisco is also pretty long.
At least the Nokia phone is a relatively mass market product.
Very insightful video David!
Hey Dave, Just wanted to let your readers know that they should let us know if they plan to be in Vegas. We'll be throwing some parties and Canadian gatherings. Let us know by emailing me or anyone on our team. daniel dot shapiro at microsoft dot com.. We'll make sure you hear about where the Canadians will be.