Product Blog

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.

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!

Thank you everybody for the spectacular feedback that was received from the first rollout. We have been busy implementing many of the changes you have suggested and are about to make the next version live.

In the next version, you will notice a new beta screen that will require you to request an invite to participate. Feel free to sign up on this page if you are interested in using the application…otherwise, sit back and enjoy the new Typeroom Lite screencast : )

We will start accepting certain users for the private beta as soon as the next version is ready and as always will be looking forward to hearing your feedback!

Thanks for visiting. This is our first blog post.

The past year or so has been an exciting process of building a tool that we hope is going to greatly benefit web designers, developers and website owners. The first version of this tool has been used only on our internal client’s projects with surprising success. Typeroom is now the next step in our offering of this product to a broader audience. This blog will be our means to communicate with you about how it is going, hopefully gain your input and feedback and discuss topics that we think will be beneficial to web developers and website owners.

The subject matter in this blog will include:

• Descriptions of the features included in Typeroom as they are released
• Product release updates
• Lessons learned in building Typeroom (and the other CMSs we have built)
• Our ideas and philosophies on CMS design in general
• How we (as Internet Simplicity) have learned from implementing a CMS in our developments.

Today we launch the beta version of Typeroom Lite as well as the typeroom.com website. We are looking forward to hearing everybody’s feedback on the idea itself, and on the first public trial of the editor we are rolling out.

On that note, please realize that there are going to be bugs in the editor. We have not ironed out every scenario yet, and only expect to have a really workable editor after it gets some serious use. So we would love to hear your feedback on the editor, bugs you hit, things you find workable and the things you think need help. Many thanks to the minds behind the idea of the WYM editor — we think it is a much better way to edit content on the internet. (There will be more blog posts to come on the editor itself).

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more updates!