Developing eWrite

Interested it seeing eWrite Lite up and running with page of your website? We’ve created a demo of eWrite Lite allowing users to enter their existing website address and log in.

eWrite Lite will grab a few pages and images from your site so you can experience editing your own work in eWrite Lite.

Thanks to Matt Hart for helping me greatly improve an existing eWrite Lite demo.

For some time now I’ve had the luxury of having many of the websites using eWrite CMS on the same servers. This has allowed me to develop the eWrite CMS in the model of software as a service (SAAS).

The eWrite content manager was located on our own website. Clients could visit our site, log in and view their own pages for editing. In the background eWrite would update the ‘remote’ database with the updated content.

With the newer eWrite Lite, I continued this approach as long as possible to allow for easier development and maintenance on my part.

For various security and connectivity issues I will be moving eWrite Lite away from this approach and following the approach used by Wordpress. eWrite Lite will be a set of files a user can upload to their site, run a setup wizard which will create a basic website and log the user into eWrite Lite to begin creating their first pages and managing their files.

It will mean a little more work for me deploying new files or updates for eWrite Lite to users websites, but Im looking forward to to the change in approach.

Until now, eWrite was quite limited in getting users to be on servers we could control. With this new approach I will be making it as easy as I can for a user to pay for eWrite Lite, download a copy and install on their site quickly and easily.

Wish me luck!

Im about to move this blog and site over to Blacknight hosting. I’ve paid for a small package and I’ll be changing the name servers shortly.

I’ve had some trouble recently setting up blogs on the existing hosting which is using IIS and so I’m looking forward to residing on a Linux server which will enable me to upgrade the blog to version 2.5.1 and enable the friendlier perma links which seem to cause issues for IIS.

Once there, I’ll be continuing to blog about the ongoing developments of eWrite Lite, eWrite Messenger and eWrite Forms more frequently.Who knows, I might end up being featured on Alltop!

I’ve had eWrite Forms running for a good few months now. In short, it’s a service which allows a website owner to replace any form on their site which is being abused by spam messages with a form protected against spam.

It was basic, providing only a few forms. A newsletter signup form, a contact form and a guestbook form. It also needed a website to use PHP on their site to allow them to integrate a form.

This was clearly quite limiting and I’ve been planning up updating this for some time. This week I was supposed to travel for a few days. Partly in relation to work and also to take a day or so for myself for some well deserved rest away from the computer.

Instead, I had an idea to stay home and try to catch up on a couple of projects. I spent a couple of days giving eWrite Forms some attention.

It now allows a user to sign up (for free) and easily create basic forms simply by ticking a few fields which they want to use.

They are provided with a short snippet of Javascript which they place on their site to display the form. The Javascript is much the same as the JS used by Polldaddy to embed Polls and Surveys on a site.

A user can create as many forms as they like. Any form they create is monitored by eWrite forms and prevents it from sending spam to the website owner using plenty of techniques including a users personal white list and a personal black list.

A user gets an email each week showing how many messages passed through the system and how many of them were spam. The legitimate messages pass through to the user as normal and the spam messages are stored in an admin panel where the user can log in at any time to review and release messages if needed. They can also customize the look of their forms using CSS to make it fit in with their site design.

Im especially pleased with these improvements but theres plenty more to add to it. I’d like to charge a small amount for this service, but Im unsure whats an acceptable price.

Some improvements underway are:

• A paid version which will send the form to the owner instantly (The current messages are scanned hourly)
• An RSS feed of messages received from a form.
• A way for the owner to customize the ‘thank you’ message when a form is submitted
• The ability to add any type of field a user wants to a form
• Better Javascript form validation.
• Import/export of emails addresses to and from the white list and black lists

Any ideas or suggestions from bloggers out there? Know anyone that has a website with a form thats sending them spam?

I’ve been thinking of adding a ‘Tip of the day’ sort of note to the dashboard of eWrite Lite that a user sees when logged into eWrite.

With eWrite providing many useful tools to manage a website, I’d like to be able to give users handy practical tips on an ongoing basis in relation to their website content.

Short and useful tips such as:

• Don’t forget to add an email address or phone numbers to your contact information page to allow customers to contact you directly
• Why not place a Google Map on your contact information page to help customers find your business, use http://www.communitywalk.com
• Try to avoid writing your email address on your site. It will prevent web robots from collecting your email address and sending you spam. Create an image with your email address instead.

Can anyone think of a few more ?

When I first saw Walter Higgins’ Pixenate, I knew it would be a great app to have available within eWrite to allow users to easily modify images without the need for expensive applications like Adobe Photoshop.

After some recent “marketing”, asking existing eWrite Lite users if they would like the ability to edit images within eWrite using a Polldaddy Poll, I met with Walter after Cork Open Coffee and he was good enough to give me the latest Hosted Edition of Pixenate to play with.

I’ve spent a few days playing around with it, and contacted Walter a couple of times when I didn’t know how to implement one function or another. He always got back to me with the info I needed and links to the appropriate sections of his online documentation.

I have it running now and I’m going to let eWrite users at it next week. I am using a theme which provides that basic image functionality such as cropping, resizing and rotating. A fraction of what Pixenate can really do.

After what Im sure will be some great praise for Pixenate, I’ll be paying a monthly fee to have Pixenate within eWrite. Worth every penny. Thanks Walter!

I received 5 concepts back from thelogocompany today.  Theres something I like in each one. You’ll probably guess that I mentioned that I like the Thunderbird logo in the forms when I was filling them out.

For now, I’m tinkering around with ideas before I get back to them with enough information to move on. So far, I’m impressed.What do you think ?

draft 1

draft 2

draft 3

draft 4

draft 5

Here is a screenshot of eWrite Lite as it current looks. (Click to enlarge)

Existing clients log into eWrite Lite by going to www.ewritecork.com and logging in via the client login on the top of the site. This may soon change, but thats for a later post.

The screen shot shows the main ‘dashboard’ which is visible when a user logs in. To get back to this screen from any other section a user need only press on the eWrite Lite heading or the little Home image along the top.

This dashboard provides a couple of quick links to various items. The first cool thing is the screen shot of users own website. This is updated any time the homepage of the site it changed. The ability to update this thumbnail is thanks to Picoshot and Thumbalizr.

Next to the screenshot a user can see the total visitors to their site today. eWrite Lite has its own scripts for recording the traffic to the site but also uses Google Analytics to provide much more information and graphs.

Following this there are 5 of the most recently edited pages, these provide a quick link to open the page for editing using the TinyMCE editor. When a page is updated an RSS feed and Sitemap XML file are updated.

Below this a user can see the limits placed upon eWrite Lite. Its limited to 100 pages and 200MBs of storage for images, videos etc. Since eWrite Lite works on the clients exiting hosting these values could change.

On the right the latest couple of blog posts are visible. It is the eWrite News blog which a user can use to keep up to date of eWrite related news or developments.

The poll thats there are the moment is to see if existing users would like to be able to edit their images within eWrite Lite. Ever since I met Walter of Pixenate I’ve been interested in embedding Pixenate into eWrite if possible so that a person could make some changes to their images. It would save them using Photoshop which they probably won’t have with them if on the road.

The main menu on top has 3 buttons representing the primary areas. ‘Content Editor’, ‘Media Manager’ and ‘Support’. When pressed each one has a drop down menu containing only 2 or 3 items each.

The Content Editor section allows a user to open any existing pages or create a new page.

The Media Manager allows users to view all exiting media files such as images, video & audio and upload new files.

The Support provides a link to the eWrite Lite online manual which is currently being worked on to show short tutorial videos on how to use the various aspects of eWrite Lite. It also opens the client’s contact details so they can keep these up to date.

Future development plans

Overall, the plan is to keep eWrite simple and useful but there are still plenty of things I want to do.

Some future goals include stream lining the interface a bit, making moving back and fourth between sections a bit smoother so that a person could being writing a new page, move to another section to read another page perhaps and go back and continue editing the page they were working on.

Im also very interested in the current Mozilla Prism work. I would like to have eWrite Lite available on the desktop for a quick link or to be used offline and sync the pages when online later on.

So thats eWrite Lite as it currently stands. Its just a tad over 3 MB.

All comments and criticisms are welcome, and if anyone would like to meet or see eWrite in action on their site, let me know.

From today on, I will be documenting the ongoing developments of ‘eWrite Lite’, a low cost and very easy to use content management system for website owners that I am responsible for developing.

There are already plenty of content management systems out there, Drupal, Mambo and Joomla to name a few. These are fantastic systems with plenty of options and add-ons. With eWrite Lite my aim is to provide a very easy to use piece of software to allow users to keep their site up to date quickly and easily at a low cost.

For now, I’m finding my feet. I haven’t run a blog before so this in itself is an interesting step for me. At first my blog posts will probably involve the development of the application itself but I plan to include anything of relevance to this project and I hope it’ll be interesting and useful to readers, I’ll be aiming high.

Thanks to Conor O’Neill and Calvin Jones for their motivating blog posts and all the people who voted on the Twitter poll provided by Polldaddy.

The Google Page Rank for the main site http://www.ewritecork.com has been updated from 0 to 3 today, so I’m off to a good start. Wish me luck!