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.

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.

1. 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!).
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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).
5. Updating the site is so easy it encourages faster, more frequent updates (which search engines love!).
6. 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!