A Web Hosting/Posting Revolution
Written: Dec 23 '99 (Updated Jun 13 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Web content management for the masses
Cons: Discussion group interface and speed
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| collin_ong's Full Review: Manila |
If you've been following Dave Winer's DaveNet or Scripting News over the past several years, you'd be familiar with his rants on how the web was becoming a platform of its own right and how it is too difficult to create and maintain websites using the standard tools, like editors, ftp clients, etc.
http://davenet.userland.com/
http://www.scripting.com/
BACKGROUND
Anybody that has tried maintaining a website has their list of gripes as well, but Winer and his company UserLand has actually gone out and done something about it. The result is server software called Manila, which can be experienced as EditThisPage.com.
Manila is a server-side application that implements a browser-controlled content management system. Manila is the current culmination of Winer's long work on Frontier, which started out as an application scripting language on Macintosh (then Windows), but has been focused over the past several years on automating web content management so that all those little, tedious steps, like updating a link or image on every page on your site, can be taken care of by the scripting engine. ISPs would do a great business by subscribe to a Frontier license and make Manila sites available to their users as a value-add or an extra-cost option. For certain, more of their personal homepages would get used and used more effectively.
http://manila.userland.com/
However, this review isn't about Manila. While Manila is the back-end brains behind EditThisPage (hereafter referred to as ETP), as a user of the service, you don't really need to know anything about how things are getting done. They just are. So what is it and what can you do with EditThisPage?
THE SERVICE
Run by UserLand as a demonstration of Manila's capabilities, ETP is a web site/weblog hosting service that allows anybody to post web pages and easily add/edit content directly through their browser. No HTML editors or ftp clients are necessary. The most salient feature of the service is the aptly-named "Edit This Page" button that is visibile when one of the site owners browses the site. When they see a page that they want to change, they just push the button and the page opens up in an text edit box. It is very much like how opinions are entered and edited here on Epinions, but generalized to handle any type of web site.
When you sign up for a site on ETP, you fill in a membership form and specify what you want for the name of your site. This name will become your URL, in the form of "sitename.editthispage.com." Not the most elegant URL, but better than the messy and clumsy URLs that come from ISP personal pages (e.g. http://www.ispname.com/users/~username/index.html) or from the community page hosting sites like Geocities (e.g. http://members.xoom.com/_XOOM/primall/mahir/). In certain respects, ETP can be viewed as a hosting site like Geocities or Xoom, but it provides much better management tools the help sustain the site past the first creation. I haven't seen anything yet that sets limits on your site size anywhere yet.
CONTENT MANAGEMENT
ETP provides mechanisms for managing four major types of content that are typically used in websites: stories, pictures, shortcuts, and dicussions. These options appear in a line of links across the top of your site when an editor is logged in. This link is not visible to site visitors that do not have editor rights.
Articles
To create a new article, or story, go to the story management page, where you will see a list of stories already on the site. These can be viewed, then edited, or a new story can be created using the prominent link at the bottom of the list. When you create a new story, you give it a title and type it into the text entry box, and click "Post New Story." When the processing is through, you'll see the story in your browser and, of course, an "Edit This Page" button. Stories can be linked from the home page, or made into the home page of the site.
One area where ease of use could be improved is by providing a WYSIWYG-type editor front end that could be used to automate the HTML that you can use in the story editing box. Alot of users interested in using ETP to automate site management won't be interested in learning all those HTML tags. There is some work going on with integration with high-end webeditors like Dreamweaver, but that's overkill for most people. I'm thinking more along the lines of a Netscape Composer or FrontPage Express that links directly into Manila/ETP. Update: UserLand is beta-testing a new add-on code-named "Pike" that appears to add this functionality.
Pictures
To work with pictures, go to the pictures management page, where you will see a list of pictures already on the site. This is similar to the story management page, but includes a browse button, which uploads a image file from your local machine, in addition to the title and text description fields. Once you have added a picture to the site, you can call it up from elsewhere, like the homepage, by simply typing its title in quotes. Now that's easy! No more image tags! However, the caveat is that you get less control over positioning, etc. of the image unless you put more work into it.
Links
A similar function is provided for "shortcuts" or links. You can input a list of links with names and URLs, and thenceforth just enter the name in quotes and have a live link inserted. No more <a href= > etc!
Discussions
Every story and picture put into the site also gets a discussion topic added automatically so people can comment on your content, ask questions, etc. New discussions can also be added on random topics and the sites users can interact though the discussion interface. While I find the discussion interface and performance rather slow, you can't deny that having them adds alot to a site and ETP makes it a lot easier than installing bulletin board software on your ISP's server.
One complaint with the management functions has to do with deleting content. To delete a story, picture, shortcut, etc, you have to go to the admin page. It would make sense to put all management functions for a particular content type on the same page, so that stories could be selected or deleted from the same place.
EASE VS CUSTOMIZATION
The problem with making something easy is that things get homogenized, bland, or cheezy or all of the above. ETP provides a default layout with title banner/tagline across the top, navigation section links along the left margin, main body text down the center, and a calendar to access past postings on the right. It's a very clean layout that you see alot of the sites on ETP using, but of course its not for everyone. The wonder of ETP is that they have made it easy to use, while maintaining levels of power available to customize a site as users learn more.
The first level is a Preferences page that lets users modify the colors and look of the site, manage access rights and editors, and more, through picking through menus of options. The second level, under the "Advanced" link in the prefs, allows you to make more fundamental changes to the layout and templates of the site, by using HTML and XML to modify the underlying code that defines the site. The beauty of this is that you can do as little or as much as you like; it's scalable.
PERFORMANCE
In my initial review of EditThisPage, I dinged it for not being a lightning quick performer, but since that time, UserLand has done quite a bit of work to speed things up, including adding more servers to handle the load, as well as adding and stabilizing their bandwidth. While not every operation performs the same, overall most functions are snappy enough to be very usable.
CONCLUSION
EditThisPage is appropriate for beginning users that want to have a web page, but don't want to learn too many details. It is also appropriate for advanced web users that don't want to worry about all the details, even if they are capable of doing so. It significantly lowers the threshold of pain for operating a frequently updated site. Using this service to host your site decreases the chances of it becoming deadwood like so many other personal home pages out there. While the performance (that I'm seeing) now is sub-par, this should resolve itself in time.
EditThisPage is revolutionary because it puts the power of content management into the hands of the masses, not just those working at high-powered commercial sites. It also decouples web editing from the desktop, so that you can update your site while traveling, at a friend's place, etc. As the web transforms more and more applications that have traditionally been desktop-centric, like email (e.g. Hotmail, Yahoo-mail, etc) and contact-management (e.g. Visto), it only makes sense that the web should itself be maintained via the web.
UserLand has announced that sites signing up with ETP in 1999 will get free hosting for life! They've also hinted that early adopters may get their fingers in any IPO that could come in the future. Which means get off yet butt and register before they start charging.
http://www.editthispage.com/
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
collin_ong
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Member: Collin Ong
Location: Sacramento, California
Reviews written: 97
Trusted by: 47 members
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