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!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 26th, 2008 at 1:02 am by Reilly Sweetland and is filed under Products. 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.