This is our first incremental update since launch and it is a big one. Each of these points will be useful, but the one we are most excited about the drag-and-drop plugins. With better handling for plugins, we have now opened up the door to a world of possibilities for extending the system while at the same time keeping the user experience seamless.

Read on to find out more….

Drag and Drop Plugins:

Plugins just got a lot more fun. We are now enabling users to interact with plugins in a visual, drag-and-drop way. Inserting a plugin only requires that it is dropped into the desired place in the content. Just to give you a better idea of what this means, here are some examples:

• Insert a YouTube movie in your content just by dragging and dropping it into place.
• Insert a Google Map by just dragging it into your content.
• Want to offer e-commerce? Just drag and drop a PayPal button in place.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg.

We provided the above 3 plugins above as examples in the plugin documentation…if you are a developer and care to look, you can see they are very simple. Well, there are thousands of other systems and applications that can be integrated into TypeRoom as plugins, many taking only a few minutes.

Not only that, but plugins can also take the form of applications that run natively on the web server (such as calendars, comment systems, news systems and more), not just hosted services such as the examples above. To the end user, the functionality is the same: just drag and drop.

If you build something cool, definitely let us know! We would like to feature some examples of what people are doing with plugins in an upcoming blog post. Some of our own examples will be in there as well.

Auto-Saving:

If you have ever spent time crafting a piece of beautiful content only to have your computer crash, or you hit “save” and your browser tells you that it “can’t find an internet connection”, you will appreciate this feature. Now, TypeRoom will auto-save your content periodically as you are making changes. If your internet connection drops on your computer, we will let you know. If your computer crashes, we will have a backup copy saved of your edited content from the last minute or so you were editing.

Content Locking:

TypeRoom works better now in team editing environments. If one person is editing a page, TypeRoom will now alert the other person that this page is locked. One can be rest assured that they won’t be saving over someone else’s changes (or that someone else is saving over yours!)

A note to designers:

Designers, we want to let you know that we have been listening to you. The above features that we released were in progress since before our launch, so we wanted to wrap them up. However, the next features we are working on have been shaped by your feedback and requests. So keep an eye out for those. There are some exciting things on the horizon.

Today, we are excited to announce the official release of TypeRoom Professional, a new type of content management system.

We hope that we have taken a giant stride toward making website management more enjoyable.

For a short preview of the system, watch the 2 minute demonstration video:

Special Offer for Early Adopters!
If you (or your clients) are interested in signing up for the system, we are offering a limited number of free integrations with the system. Read about the free integration offer. Questions, feedback, comments? We would love to hear from you! Please comment below, email us at feedback@typeroom.com or find us on twitter ( @typeroom ).

After just over a year of releasing TypeRoom Lite into the wild (in Beta), thousands of sites edited and tons of feedback I wanted to take a moment to let our users know where we are with the project and what our plans are for future development of this system.

As you have probably noticed, the system has been in a beta testing state for the entirety of its existence. When we first launched, we were not sure how long we were going to keep the product in a beta (and free for our users)…but after the first few thousand sites passed through our system, we quickly gained an understanding of the complexity and variation of the sites that people were trying to edit.

“Automagically” making websites selectively editable using browsers’ limited editing support (content.editable plus some very creative javascript) is a difficult problem. We are successful with about 80% of pages that pass through the system (per our survey results)… which we are happy about. (The people who regularly use TypeRoom Lite to update their sites are happy about this as well!) But we’re not happy enough about it to remove the “beta” label and actually start charging for the product.

So we have some improvements to make. The great news is that this extensive testing has given us quite a bit of insight on two at least two points:

• Building TypeRoom Professional (our full CMS product).
• Exactly what we need to change to take TypeRoom Lite to the next level.

TypeRoom Professional

As you may have noticed from our last few blog posts, TypeRoom Professional has been our top priority. In fact, if you were wondering why TypeRoom Lite was not getting more attention, more frequent updates and bug fixes, this is the answer.

TypeRoom Lite has had multiple purposes: First, to make a nice, light-weight editing system that could easily edit static HTML pages. Second (but perhaps equally as important) to introduce and demonstrate a brand new concept of how a CMS could operate. This is the concept of “remote CMS”, as we call it (ie, we host the CMS but publish the site to your server). Since we launched, other systems have sprung up as well that have a similar architecture.

In other words, TypeRoom Lite was part useful product, part experiment and part introduction / demonstration.

With it, we hope to have set the stage for TypeRoom Professional — a more powerful and complete CMS that allows for extremely easy setup and integration, and that gives a level of usability that we feel has not been attained before in a CMS.

TypeRoom Lite

So where does this leave TypeRoom Lite? Well, our users have pretty much answered that question for us. It’s here to stay.

And what is really interesting is that through some combined efforts (our users included) we have come to a vision of this system that could be awesome…and something even more than we originally envisioned.

It is inherently not as complete as TypeRoom Professional when it comes to acting as a CMS, but we feel it could have a permanent place in the web designer / developer’s tool kit.

The Future

Stay tuned for the launch of TypeRoom Professional. We can’t wait to show you it to you. We will inevitably iterate on this product with the help and feedback of our users, but the foundation and concept will remain the same. The feedback we have received has been very positive so far.

As for TypeRoom Lite, there will probably be a TypeRoom Lite version 2 Beta before version 1 itself comes out of beta. There are some fundamental changes that we now know need to be made to get it meet all of our goals. That said, you are free to keep using the system and we still are making backups of the pages it updates (in the “tr_backups” folder on the server where it is publishing), and if it works with your site, it could be a great free CMS that can be used with no installation or even a future dependency on the system. (Note: we recommend using Firefox since IE likes to reorganize your HTML formatting). And please feel free to keep submitting feedback and bug reports. It ultimately makes all TypeRoom systems system more useful.

If you have any questions or comments for us, please feel free to post them below!

It has begun!

The official release of a visual, flexible and easy-to-use CMS is right around the corner.

We are accepting a limited number of people into our private beta.  If you are interested, you must be sworn to secrecy first…but we may need a few more people to test it out. We are specifically looking to test publishing on many different hosting providers (PHP / Apache are required), as well as the import of various types of sites.  Drop us an email at feedback@typeroom.com if you want to be part of the early testing group.

What feedback we have received so far has been very positive. This is really a new (and much simpler) way of looking at how a CMS can be offered. We hope you will share our same enthusiasm once you see the system. Regardless of if you hear back from us on the private beta invites (we may not be able to reply to everyone) feel free to sign up to be on the TypeRoom Pro launch mailing list. We will email you as soon as it’s available.

We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

Things have been a bit quiet lately here on the TypeRoom blog, but that does not mean we have been unproductive! Development of TypeRoom Pro has never been going better and we are hard at work on getting TypeRoom Professional to a release-ready version.

Ironing out the bugs inherent in taking apart other people’s code is, needless to say, a definite undertaking. But I continue to be surprised by how many sites we can now make “instantly editable”. This will of course be a continuing task, since the diversity with how websites are programmed seems to have no bounds.

Stay tuned for more updates, and feel free to contact us if you have any feedback, bug reports or suggestions.

Today, we are pushing our most major update yet to the TypeRoom Lite Content Management System.

Following the open beta, we received some great feedback. The bug reports were numerous and varied (as can be expected given the fact that we are dealing with such a huge variation as to how existing sites are programmed) and the suggestions and ideas we received were quite insightful. So thanks everybody for your input!

This update consists of a several core changes to the system that were selected because they would make the biggest impact on the most critical types of bug reports we received.

While there are many aspects of the system that we are still planning to refine, our primary goal right now something we feel undercuts all others: enable TypeRoom to integrate with the largest variety of websites online possible. Once we have accomplished our goal here, we will be moving on to the fun stuff…features, UI enhancements, TypeRoom Professional and beyond.

We are going to be doing a series of posts on a some these updates over the next few days, so stay tuned for that.

In the meantime, take a look at the system and let us know what you think! (Comments are welcome below).

After several months of testing and refinement, we are happy to announce that TypeRoom Lite has now entered Open Beta.

You, your customers and friends are now welcome to use TypeRoom Lite to freely make changes to websites and collaborate on content.

The best part is that since it is still in beta, it is still free. However, we do expect there to be bugs that come up as we start to work with a wider sampling of websites.

If you have any friends, customers or websites of your own that you have been meaning to update, now is your chance!

Thanks again for your support and feedback and we look forward to hearing from you! Feel free to comment below or email us through the feedback links (or bug report links) in the app.

If you have been waiting anxiously for a beta invite for a while now, we appreciate your patience…but you will hopefully not have to wait much longer! We are increasing the number of beta users we are allowing into TypeRoom Lite. Invite emails will be going out in next few days.

We pushed another release of TypeRoom Lite today with a few bug fixes as well as a modification or two to the editor. Specifically some alterations to make it easier to use. (Thanks for everyone’s input here!)

As far as those of you asking about TypeRoom Professional (our most frequently asked question), we are working on this and it is going very well. Your feedback and use of TypeRoom Lite is ultimately helping our overall progress on TypeRoom Pro.

On that note, we made a small expansion to the informational section of our site (available to beta users) that will hopefully make the difference between TypeRoom Lite and TypeRoom Professional much clearer.

As always, please feel free to post feedback here, or email us at feedback@typeroom.com

We just pushed an update with a few bug fixes and some optimizations for execution speed. Everbody’s input has been much appreciated so far.

If you have any comments or suggestions feel free to comment here or email us at feedback@typeroom.com

Yesterday we sent out our first beta invitations for TypeRoom Lite and have received some great feedback so far.

We were very happy to see how much positive feedback people had (and in a surprising diversity of geographies!). Some points people brought up gave us some great insight on areas that we might want to clarify or improve.

So I thought I would take a moment to address some of these questions…

1. Comparing TypeRoom Lite and other CMS engines (specifically, thinking that TypeRoom Lite is trying to compete with products such as WordPress, Drupal, etc).

   Instead of going through the motions to explain this, I though I’d take an an excerpt from a review that I feel accurately reflects our intentions with the product:

   “As of this beta release I would recommend it to web developers with clients that don’t quite need a full content management system but require edits from time to time.” – tinyMeme

   The above author and I ended up emailing back and forth a couple times regarding her post. She mentioned this scenario in an email which I thought is a perfect example use case:

   “…I was actually in need of something like this some time ago but it just didn’t exist yet. I opted for wordpress and used low permission levels for the client…”

   TypeRoom Lite is simply the right tool for a certain content management scenario, and by no means is it right for every scenario. I will say though that Typeroom Lite is…dare I use the superlative… simplest CMS that is currently available.

   Putting yourself in the in the shoes of a non-technical website owner who does not know what FTP is, does not know how the internet works, etc, we figured the absolute simplest thing they could to to manage their content was:

   1. Go to typeroom.com
   2. Type in their URL
   3. Make their edits
   4. Email them to their webmaster.

   (Note there is no “signup” step, nor any “payment” step in the above sequence).

   An even shorter editing experience (although a shade more technical since it requires dragging a bookmarklet to your toolbar) could be:

   1. Click the “Edit in TypeRoom Lite” bookmarklet
   2. Edit
   3. Publish (email to webmaster, ftp, etc)

   (We will be writing more about this bookmarklet trick in a future post).

   So essentially, TypeRoom Lite is a niche product built out of a personal need we had for a product like this.

2. Application security. We figured this would come up (and have published some information about this on the signup page within the application as well). To answer this question here:

   TypeRoom Lite does not actually store the FTP password. Every editing session, you are required to enter your FTP password to confirm. (Note that your browser will typically store the password during the editing session since the forms and windows are AJAX based). This makes FTP access theft from the TypeRoom Lite databases pretty much impossible.

3. Questions about TypeRoom Pro.

   We were hoping you would never ask There was some speculation on this, but I will just say that this product is quite a bit different from TypeRoom Lite. It is similar in that it is a Remote CMS, but is different on a fundamental, architectural level. TypeRoom Pro is a robust CMS that is meant to handle large websites.

   We will release more information about TypeRoom Professional as the features become available to show.

That’s it for now.

If you have any questions or want to know anything more about TypeRoom Lite, please post them below!