Developing eWrite

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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.

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 ?

The eWrite Lite business cards, designed and printed by TheLogoCompany arrived!

I was nervous about how they would turn out. There are many good things happening at eWrite at the moment and I wondered if I was going in the right direction getting a specific card for the eWrite Lite software.

eWrite Lite Business Card

The cards look great! The front is crisp and glossy with a matt back containing my contact details. I have 498 of these (My parents took one each) that I’ll be passing on to anyone that even looks my way from now on.

TheLogoCompany asked for a testimonial to put in their forum which I happily wrote. They sent me on the logo designs, business card designs, letterheads, compliment slips in more graphic formats than I know what to do with.

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.