For the last 10 months at Evectors we have been working on a new application which we are calling PagesPlus.
It’s not strictly a content management system: most of the content is not authored within our application, it’s more a content presentation system, or if you like a tool to manage content flows in an editorial environment.
The core of PagesPlus is an aggregator which can digest any form of RSS/Atom and uses tags to organize everything it aggregates (it’s loosely based on the concept that, together with Matt Mower, we developed for our K-Collector application back in 2002). The aggregator supports tag schemas, meaning not only that, for example, it can tell the difference between a topic-tag and a category-tag, but also that you can create your own schemas to address special needs.
If the aggregator manages the back-end, a WYSIWYG application allows you to manage the front end. We are using again the metaphor of “plus” buttons: you click on a plus button to add content in a specific area of the page, you choose what type of element you want to add, and seconds later the page is updated.
The third part of the application is a “widgeting” platform. With this latest addition you can detach any module from a PagesPlus page and insert it in any other page on the web. The system does all the necessary CSS/HTML/JavaScript magic that will guarantee your widget to look the same everywhere you paste it.
Just to give an idea of what it can do, using PagesPlus in the last months we have have developed these sites:
Using PagesPlus to create site with very strict specifications has been a very useful exercise, forcing us to eat our own dog food and putting us in the shoes of designers, editors, writers, publishers.
I must say I’m very happy with the results. Not only we have been able to put together a killer team, but we also ended up having a very good product (whith an even more impressive list of features on our roadmap).
The plan is to release the application with some open source license (still trying to figure out which one to pick) and let a thousand flowers bloom.
Hoping to have a little more time available in the next few weeks, I’m planning to post here the description of how the system works, maybe a few screencasts to show how the real thing works. Meanwhile, if you have any questions, feel free to comment below or to ping me.