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!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 9:45 pm by Reilly Sweetland and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.