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I’d like to discuss a bit of my experience tinkering with re-skinning portions of our Content Management System, i3SiteTools,using Flex 2. The tools that make up the ‘CMS’ (sometimes referred to as the ‘SMS’ for Site Management System) have been built and tweeked over the past 10 years by several developers. A lot of thought and energy went in to making the display forms be able to do tricks like searching and column sorting. Generally, this was accomplished by harnessing the power of the backend with SQL and self-posting pages. A lot of conditional logic was incorporated into the ColdFusion pages to build and manage the display.
We have spent a lot of time in the past few months experimenting with the Flex 2.0 Alpha, Macromedia's (now Adobe) latest offering in the Rich Internet Application development arena. From what we have seen so far, it's an amazing tool for delivering the kind of powerful applications we build. We have built a wonderful RIA alternative for searching Amazon.com, complete with slider filtering on price and publication date and a toggle between image view and data view of the search results. Look for a link to demo the application in a future post from our new developer Darin Kohles.We are hard at work giving some overdue love and attention to our very own CMS, fixing little bugs and rethinking the flow of some of the tools. i3SiteTools is the engine that has driven the Content Management side of our business and we are excited about taking it to the next level in 2006! We are planning a new RIA dashboard that will give our users even easier access to the content on their site and puts all of the information they need at their fingertips including some traffic stats, a message queue and more.
Additionally, we are building out a new media-driven help document library. Using Adobe's Captivate, we are creating a series of narrated mini-movies to walk users through using all of the tools in i3SiteTools. This library accompanied by a robust new glossary of all things "webish" are part of our commitment to make owning and maintaining websites the best possible experience for all users.
Yes, it is true, the cobbler's children often go shoeless. We are finally making the time to rework our own web site and have thrown the gauntlet down to launch by the end of January (2006 that is ;-)!
We have nearly killed each other in the planning phase --- everybody gets a little bit passionate about our beloved DP site and the grand vision of what it can be. But that's good, because nothing good ever came from apathy, and you can quote me on that! I figure the last one standing when the dust settles gets to actually build it! Apathy's lookin' better all the time.
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