Show HN: Instant CMS as a Service on any element (with contenteditable)

by mhurwi • 14 years ago

113 58 14 years ago

bergie10• 14 years ago

Interesting. Though of course you can just use my http://createjs.org/ and get pretty much the same thing for free :-)

railsjedi2• 14 years ago

CreateJS is awesome. This service seems to be more about content hosting though. So still useful to some people I think.

bergie10• 14 years ago

True, though usually people would seem rather want to have their content on their own servers, and have an API the editing tool uses to save. This is the scenario Create.js was built for, allowing you to use it in a custom web app, but also major CMSs like TYPO3 or OpenCms to build their custom UIs on top of it.

clone1018• 14 years ago

Your site fails to load almost completely past the homepage, when I try to use your demo I get quite of a bit of resources 504ing.

callmevlad5• 14 years ago

Pretty sure it's getting overloaded with traffic, because it wasn't like that a few hours ago.

navs3• 14 years ago

Love it! Now a quick question, is there any way to allow for editable blocks to be re-arranged via some form of drag and drop interface?

Or is there anyone out there that knows of a library that could possibly do this?

bergie10• 14 years ago

Not yet integrated upstream, but you can see block drag-and-drop in action with Create in http://demo.contentcontrol-berlin.de/

callmevlad5• 14 years ago

Glad to see that contenteditable-type editors are becoming more viable. Looks like Copybar uses Redactor, but I'm hoping bergie's http://hallojs.org/ gets a lot more traction since it's the only one that's MIT licensed.

bergie10• 14 years ago

The good thing about Hallo is, besides licensing and easy plugin development, the fact that it uses plain, unstyled contentEditables, so the stuff you're editing looks exactly like it will look on the real page.

I integrated Redactor as another editor option in Create.js a while back, but it looks a bit strange because it changes the styling of the currently active content area. Other than that it is very simple and clean!

Another valid editor option is Aloha, http://aloha-editor.org

You can use any (or even all) of these with Create, or integrate your own. The next editor I'm looking to add is CKEditor 4, as it also has an inline editing mode: http://nightly-v4.ckeditor.com/3627/samples/inlineall.html

marccantwell10• 14 years ago

Great point. We hacked redactor up so that it does just that, allows for unstyled contentEditables. Check it out with the Try Now button on the landing page, you can see the styles don't change.

callmevlad5• 14 years ago

Easy plugin development and unstyled contentEditables are the top two reasons we chose Hallo over Redactor for our project.

Took a long look at Aloha, but it has such a big footprint that it scared me away.

Thanks for the pointer to CKEditor 4, I wasn't aware they had an inline mode.

wamatt• 14 years ago

Bergie's halloJS is awesome!

Would be great to see some keyboard support in the future however. eg Super-B/ctrl-b for bold. Haven't tested on Windows, but OS X is lacking working functionality in the latest build

navs3• 14 years ago

Hallo looks amazing! I need to find a way to integrate this into Drupal.

mharty• 14 years ago

Pasting causes tab to crash in Windows Chrome 22.0.1229.94

marccantwell10• 14 years ago

Copybar cofounder here. Sorry about that. Please email me at marc@copybar.io. We'll try to repo and fix ASAP

AhtiK• 14 years ago

Website looks really good!

Is copybar dynamically replacing the content and then next time when the page is loaded javascript replaces the content by fetching the value from copybar CDN?

At least it looks like copybar is not changing the actual CMS database content values. Please correct me if I misunderstood the mechanics.

The problem with dynamic replacing would be: 1) search engines get the old text 2) original CMS editing functionality becomes useless for that specific node.

marccantwell10• 14 years ago

Copybar cofounder here.

Thanks! Yeah, we're using the CDN to dynamically display your edited content.

When editing an element, we invalidate the cache on the CDN. It may take a minute or 2 to propagate.

Search engines these days execute Javascript so it can index this dynamic text. However we also have a backend integration solution (via a simple rest call) for people who would rather serve the content from their web servers directly.

duiker101• 14 years ago

Does someone actually uses this tools for editing webpages? I find them really uncomfortable. Not trying to flame, just an honest question.

freemans86• 14 years ago

I actually have been looking for something like this. Mainly so I can give some nontechnical people access to edit different parts of a page. This hasn't been easy to set up in drupal or wordpress (without a large learning curve on their parts). I might give Copybar a try and see if it works out for me.

marccantwell10• 14 years ago

Copybar cofounder here, that is one of our primary use cases. Instances when a CMS fails to address access controls for nontechnical people. Even drupal and wp can seem overwhelming to some. The best thing is Copybar can sit on top of Drupal and Wordpress. If you do end up using it let us know, we'd love to be able to feature some live implementations.

pajju• 14 years ago

Any pointers on how to integrate with Django?

mhurwi3• 14 years ago

Sure, we'd love to add a Django plugin. Can you email me at mark@copybar.io? We'll get one set up for you.

yakshaving• 14 years ago

Ohhhh, nice! This is sick, I could see using this as a way better CopyCopter replacement.

marccantwell10• 14 years ago

Cofounder here, we did find some inspiration in CopyCopter.

lifeisstillgood2• 14 years ago

I think this is the beginning of the end for Facebook.

Let me explain ...

Like AOL, Facebook is a walled garden reproducing what is standard and open on the web/internet as a whole. AOL had AOL email, Facebook has html homepages, and RSS/ATOM

But "people" cannot create their own content - they cannot write HTML, host web pages etc. But contenteditable fixes all that - and with the clever Dropbox tie in, anyone can start with a templated page, drag and drop images from their own desktop, (#) and publish themselves.

Add in RSS via Javascript and its all over.

(#) oh yes drag and drop images onto a web page - its soooo cool. Aloha supports it at least.

therealarmen• 14 years ago

Let me get this straight -- my grandma has to get a Dropbox (what's that?), download a templated page, fill it her own images, and then figure out how to publish it?

Also, there are a lot easier ways out there to publish your own content online (Weebly, Tumblr, etc) but that doesn't seem to have stopped Facebook.

bravoyankee• 14 years ago

Dear sweet "Grams" is only on Facebook because that's where her grandchildren hang out. If they leave, do you think she's going to stick around? Doubt it.

marccantwell10• 14 years ago

Copybar Cofounder here, we support drag and drop images upload as well.

lifeisstillgood2• 14 years ago

That's great - I only know of Aloha but this whole new ecosystem springing up from contenteditabke is really impressive.

Whilst it is of course possible to replace a CMS with flat HTML files what is the main target Market you see for this?

neya3• 14 years ago

Just one small feedback as a designer, if you want to see more conversions for sign-ups, convert that black sign-up button into green. Other than that, it's perfect!

marccantwell10• 14 years ago

Cofounder here, thanks for your feedback, great suggestion.

neya3• 14 years ago

You're most welcome :)

modarts• 14 years ago

Design impaired developer here; i'm interested to know how you picked green as being a trigger for more conversions, is there some data with A/B testing this color choice comes from?

neya3• 14 years ago

Yes, I think there's a famous book on Psychology of colors, I don't remember its name, but it explains in great depth about colors affect purchases...

pioul• 14 years ago

The tool looks great, but as a developer I have to say I still really prefer having HTML and CSS in front of me.

maxmcd• 14 years ago

Doesn't seem that anyone has mentioned this, but that watermark is the only thing stopping me from immediately putting this into production. Would be nicer from a consumer perspective if I could try this out in production with the full feature set, but just a limited element quantity.

mhurwi3• 14 years ago

The badge is meant for free accounts. But please, email me (mark@copybar.io) and we'll get you setup ASAP.

michaelbuckbee• 14 years ago

Looks really cool, but I was wondering if you could address a point with the pricing. In that context what does an "asset" mean? An editable area on a webpage?

mhurwi3• 14 years ago

Yes, basically each asset (we're trying to say 'Copybar element') is one editable chunk. It could be one paragraph or picture, or it could be all custom HTML.

Also, something interesting: you can use the same element across many different pages. It will repeat the same content, but still count as only 1 element.

oron• 14 years ago

you have a link on the home page that points to http://copybardev.io:3000/examples ...

marccantwell10• 14 years ago

Copybar cofounder here, great catch, thanks.

skyhook_mockups• 14 years ago

Interesting concept, well done for shipping. Just a couple of points:

- You id="mask" element has a higher z-order than your formatting popup making it impossible to select styles in the demo.

- The blink from the original to the edited content is kind of jarring. Not sure where your servers are, but here from AUS the lag was very noticable.

- This is a peeve I have with all editors: When you select a H1,2,3 etc style the entire block is styled. This is the opposite of what users expect. Instead you should break that fragment out and run your execCommand on it. This way only the selected text receives the style and your users aren't left scratching their heads :)

- Consider adding an in-line editor for in-line images. Popping over a modal editor onmouseup is not intuitive for your average Joe.

marccantwell10• 14 years ago

Copybar cofounder here, thanks for the great feedback. We'll take a look at the mask issue asap. Delivery will continue to be optimized and I dig your ideas on the styling and image editing, look for those enhancements soon.

ams6110• 14 years ago

I don't get it. What is it supposed to do. I click on the big green "Try it now" button and nothing happens...

marccantwell10• 14 years ago

Copybar cofounder here, sorry to hear that you didn't see anything happen. What browser are you using?

borplk• 14 years ago

Good stuff. FYI, tried on Android, didn't work (nothing happens).

Ensorceled• 14 years ago

The pricing seems way out of wack. If, for instance, I wanted to use your product to create a squarespace competitor, I'd need a $99 licence per user per month?

I can't actually think of a practical use case for the Pro-xx accounts. A fairly simple blog would easily have a 100 assets or more. Even a simple corporate blog would have 100 assets after a few months.

In particular, I'm trying to figure out what your expected use case is for the Pro-20 account ... what kind of site would I have only 20 assets that I want multiple editors to be able to change?

Websites tend to be many asset/many editors or many assets/few editors. I can't think of too many few assets/many editor situations.

nnq• 14 years ago

...so my site would have and ADMINISTRATIVE/EDITORIAL feature that depends on a 3rd party service now?! Thanks but no thanks...

(Sometimes I wish people would go back to the golden days of "software as a product" instead of the current "everything as a service" way of selling things... I just wanna pay for it once, include it as a plugin for my CMS and MAYBE pay extra for some kind of support... and yes, I would be willing to pay for an upgrate to the next version too...)

Show HN: Instant CMS as a Service on any element (with contenteditable)

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