Frequently Asked Questions

If you have any questions or recommended additions to this FAQ, please contact us.

What's the difference between TypeRoom Lite and TypeRoom Pro?

TypeRoom Lite is a light-weight, instant-website-editing tool. It is designed to edit one page at a time.

Typroom Professional is a full-featured CMS. The general concept is similar to TypeRoom Lite (it is a remote CMS) but instead of just being able to edit one page at a time, TypeRoom Professional is a complete web content management system. TypeRoom Professional addresses the core issues that surround managing a website: migrating a website to a CMS, website organization, templates, menus, users and permissions.

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What do you mean by "Remote Content Management System"?

"Remote Content Management" is the best descriptive phrase we could think of for the way that TypeRoom is set up in relationship to a website it is editing.

The short answer is that the TypeRoom CMS lives on one server, but publishes the actual website to a remote server where the site is ultimately hosted. (Usually the same server that the website resides on before TypeRoom ever came into the picture. If that does not fully answer the question, continue reading below....

To best describe the definition of this term, we will frame it in the context of how most CMSes are used today:

  • Download and customize: Traditionally, a CMS is a piece of software that you download, customize for your website and then install on a web server where your website ultimately lives.
  • Hosted content management: The other fairly common option is to host your website with a provider that offers both a CMS as well as live hosting for your website (often in combination with other services such as email accounts, FTP, etc).

Remote content management describes a third method that is in between the above methods: Your website lives on one server (a live production server), but the advanced website editing tools live on a separate, more powerful server. Changes that are made on this more robust CMS server are then published to the production web server. There are many advantages to this arrangement. For example, using this method, a website can take advantage of advanced, powerful and up-to-date CMS functionality that only a complicated development environment can handle while keeping the live, production environment simple, fast, stable and efficient.

In TypeRoom, this remote management functionality is combined with additional technology to facilitate setting up a website on the CMS, as well as publishing technology that allows a website to migrate to TypeRoom without risking the existing website files being overwritten.

We started using this phrase internally in the development of TypeRoom and over time it (for obvious reasons) just stuck.

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Is there really no programming required?

Yes. To set up a website on TypeRoom Professional, no programming is required. However, advanced users may want to create special functionality for certain website scenarios that can be addressed at the template code level.

One of our key design principles of TypeRoom is adopted from the Ruby on Rails philosophy: convention over configuration.

The system is very easy to use with existing conventions (without programming) but is able to be easily tailored and customized at the code level.

See the compatibility guidelines for more information.

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What is the significance of the way the editor looks?

Since most of us come from a background of years of word processing experience, we are used to the concept of "What you see is what you get". If you use tabs, spaces, format bars or style palettes, it doesn't really matter as long as it looks right in the end. A website of course also has this as a factor, BUT, there is another, very important dimension on the web that does not exist on paper (and that that vast majority of website editors do not address): MEANING.

This editor is inspired and based off of the WYM Editor. WYM stands for What You Mean.

To a human, large bold text is simply large bold text. But to an automated program reading your website (such as a search engine) there is quite a difference between the primary header "H1" (the subject of the whole page), and simply a paragraph.

There are many other advantages of the editor, not the least of which is clean code that loads quickly and is easy to maintain. Keep an eye out on our blog for posts about our ideas, innovations and future developments on this editor.

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What are the server requirements needed to host TypeRoom Lite and TypeRoom Professional sites?

TypeRoom Lite can be used with any web server.

TypeRoom Professional is compatible with any server operating system that runs:

  • PHP 4+
  • Apache

Unlike TypeRoom Lite (which simply publishes static HTML files), TypeRoom Professional installs a light-weight application on the receiving web server that allows for efficient interaction between the TypeRoom CMS (that is hosted on our infrastructure) and the live website. This application allows for very large websites to take advantage of the TypeRoom Professional advanced functionality without (for example) requiring thousands of HTML pages to be re-published every time a website menu is changed.

With the use of the TypeRoom API (coming soon), TypeRoom will be able to interact with any receiving system on any OS a web developer wishes.

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What are the website compatibility guidelines for TypeRoom Lite and TypeRoom Professional?

Generally speaking, TypeRoom Lite will work with any HTML web page that is not built with frames and that contains HTML text. (We may expand this answer as we gather more input during our beta phase of TypeRoom Lite.)

TypeRoom Professional has similar requirements, but makes use of additional functionality that require following certain, basic conventions (which most well-programmed websites follow already). This convention exists mainly for menus where we have standardized on the use of unordered lists. Our intention is to make the system able to use unordered lists with as much flexibility possible, however, we do not expect the first release to work with every type of unordered list implementation, or every possible HTML programming method.

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How do I get the bookmarks toolbar to show up on Firefox?

Go to your top menu bar, click on View > Toolbars > Bookmarks Toolbar. Normally this is enabled by default.

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