We were contacted a few months ago by a team building the brand new Konductor Website Content Management System, built on the chassis of the new Adobe Air Application. We were lucky enough to get in on the development beta team and have been toying with the new software for a while now. It’s been awesome to see bleeding edge technology developed in front of your eyes, and we haven’t fully touched the capabilities of the beta software we’ve got access to.
Straight away, the software eliminates clumsy CMS interfaces like Joomla that seem to serve mostly to confuse the average user and replaces it with a visual drag-and-drop-style environment. The core text editor serves the same role as most editors out there – add rich text, images, links and the like with relative ease, but one nice feature is the extremely simple form builder that allows the average user to add web-based forms with ease.
The system allows for simple creation of menus and new pages, and has simple preview tools to review your work. The core for collaborative content creation appears to be there as well. In all, the tasks most commonly required by the average web content editor are exceedingly simple.
So are we switching our web-based workflow to Konductor? Not quite yet. The system is powerful, but there are some big questions to answer before we pitch our tent in the Konductor camp.
Straight away, the software eliminates clumsy CMS interfaces like Joomla that seem to serve mostly to confuse the average user and replaces it with a visual drag-and-drop-style environment.
Here is a shortlist of pros and cons:
Pros for the Content Editor:
- Simple simple tools. We like simple tools at Redpoint.
- Ease of dynamic page and navigation creation and management.
- drag and drop style asset management
Cons for the Content Editor:
- Somewhat clumsy form builder needs work to perfect it’s relevance (I already know this is happening)
- Web hosting options may be limited, with will impact IT departments buy-in
- The software requires installation of the Konductor application – another potential problem for finicky IT managers.
Pros for the Developer:
- Streamlined one-click integration into Adobe Dreamweaver
- Infinite template options with simple design integration
Cons for the Developer:
- Hosting limitations
- Potential limitations with server side scripting for custom functions (I haven’t completely explored this yet)
At the end of the day, the Konductor platform will prove to be a powerful and simple to use website content manager. Once the kinks are sorted, This will allow for simple sites to be created almost as soon as the design is done. This is huge. Monumental in fact. It’s exciting to see this develop. I’ll post more as I toy with the beta software.