I want to hear some feedback about the Conference! Most importantly, I want to hear how the MySource 4 demo went! Someone fill me in, how are the features, and what was Vyper like?
Well, not quite as pretentious as that. It's just Viper. :P
I had seen bits and pieces of My4 as the guys were building it, so it wasn't new to me. I am also interested to hear from the guys who'd seen it for the first time.
The My4 demo was pretty cool, the interface is very slick and shiny! Gotta love shiny things with drop shadows. However, I was expecting a demo of the admin interface, but the simple edit interface is much much nicer in My4 and is gonna kick as$.
Any previews for us poor UK people who couldn't get travel budgets to come, despite attempting to be persuasive? :ph34r:
The Admin Interface is pretty cool in its current form, but I believe it may be getting a fairly significant overhaul, which is one of the reasons it wasn't shown.
Let's face it, the admin interface was crap, so we removed it. We started again on that bit.
We're actually moving into the wizard interface now so that you can create your own asset types and wizards for them. That will be really cool.
The MS4 demo was interesting. Can't wait to see the more admin side of things. The in-page editing though is really nice, as you are editing with the design/styles applied what you see is really what you get (so our authors who aren't web savy will find it much less confusing). It'll be interesting to see well it handles cut & paste from Word docs into the page and ensuring the XHTML is clean and compliant.
Highlighting the edited areas that contain a change is nice but it'd be cool to incorporate the showdiff feature so the exact changes can be quickly seen by approvers (so they don' thave to read a whole page just to approve a single word that was changed).
Autosave and browser-close feature is really cool and will be a time (life!) saver.
The whole plugin/modular approach to the system will be great for doing custom development.
I am looking forward to seeing more of it as it progresses.
The good news is that Viper gives us complete control over how we accept pasted content. So if you paste from Word, we can apply our own cleaning rules and not rely on what the browser does before we get it. We can do that on-paste, or provide a cleanup tool. We can also paste text-only if we choose, so the result is like if you had pasted into a text box. That is great for removing styles and allowing you to re-format your content, but you wouldn't use that option for tables.
[quote]Highlighting the edited areas that contain a change is nice but it'd be cool to incorporate the showdiff feature so the exact changes can be quickly seen by approvers (so they don' thave to read a whole page just to approve a single word that was changed).[/quote]
That interface will have a visual difference tool, but it will be more advanced than the current one in Matrix. The same will happen for workflow approvals.
[quote]The good news is that Viper gives us complete control over how we accept pasted content. So if you paste from Word, we can apply our own cleaning rules and not rely on what the browser does before we get it. We can do that on-paste, or provide a cleanup tool. We can also paste text-only if we choose, so the result is like if you had pasted into a text box. That is great for removing styles and allowing you to re-format your content, but you wouldn't use that option for tables.
That interface will have a visual difference tool, but it will be more advanced than the current one in Matrix. The same will happen for workflow approvals.[/quote]
Ya the MS4 demo is very impressive. Just wondering if there is some place here we may discuss it? In General Discussion?
You can start a thread if you have questions. I'll answer any that I can. General Discussion would be fine.
I know a lot of the clients got a great deal from the conference, talking with Squiz and with other users.
But what did Squiz get from the conference? I'm sure there must have been a lot of feedback.
Is there a MySource 4 feature list that you could post Greg? I am sure it is not finished, but could you fill us in on some of the really killer features that will be coming?!
All I can tell you is what was demonstrated and what we are working on right now. I can't give you a full feature list.
But what I demonstrated was true inline content editing (including inline WYSIWYG editing), auto saving of unsaved changes and unsaved changes warnings, and editing files via WebDAV. I also showed the start of the wizard-based content adding system.
We are currently working on that wizard system, giving you the ability to create your own asset types and define the wizard interfaces for them. I can't show anything, but I can tell you that the interface is going to be amazing. It's also only for admins, so not everyone will be interested in it.
Something a little more interesting is the other thing we are working on; the design editing interface. This replaces the system of text boxes (for parse files) and assets for customisations with something really really simple. We are replacing the text box with a rich text editor and some smart code that can take parts of a static HMTL page and turn them into design areas. That interface is going to make editing, adding and sharing designs very easy.
I'm sure everyone got something different out of the conference. For me, I really enjoyed seeing Matrix systems I'd contributed to but not seen before, speaking to Bruce and Neil about accessibility in MySource4, and finding out what features interested the Matrix community at the Feature Bazaar. I wrote a short review on my blog.
I liked talking with people and seeing what they were doing with Matrix (and, perhaps more interestingly, what they wanted to do with Matrix). I'm really looking forward to Matrix/5 (which is what I'm calling the PHP5 version of Matrix and that is a totally unofficial moniker, btw).
Is there going to be some kind of solicited feedback for the conference? I noticed there weren't any feedback forms to fill out on the last day.
We're just getting all the conference info (presentations etc) together. That will include an online feedback form to gather conference feedback.
Hi,
Recently I came across of IdeaExchange by SalesForce which is very similar to what was done on your Conference.
I think it is a very cool idea to involve customers this way rather than in forum. You will admit it is a bit different. You can vote, you can comment, developers can clarify and comment and finally it is very clear what customers want just by looking at votes count.
I am looking very carefully at SalesForce - there are good things and bad things to learn from technically and conceptually.
Dell used this concept from SalesForce to launch a portal to grab feature ideas their first tablet should have.
I do not think they patented it :)’ /> and I am sure this can be done even better (as a module <img src=‘http://forums.matrix.squiz.net/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/wink.gif’ class=‘bbc_emoticon’ alt=’
? )
Igor
That looks like a great idea. Thanks for posting it.