Raymond Camden said:
>>> common, real world scenario that is poorly addressed in
>>Spectra. The COAPI
>>> will certainly support building tools to support this scenario,
>>> but a better
>>> methodology should have been supported within Spectra
>>itself. We wrestled
>>
>>I think your kind of right here, but I don't see this as a
>>negative. I think
>>every CM product strikes a line between out of box tools and
>>extensibility.
>>I think Spectra has less out of box type tools, but is much
>>more open than
>>other products. In my opinion, this is better, but of course,
>>I'm biased.
Put your bias aside and consider the idea that Spectra could have better out
of the box functionality. What's being sold (or what was being sold) wasn't
the COAPI and suggestions on how to implement it. What was being sold was
Content Management, Workflow, Business Process Automation, Personalization
and Membership using Spectra. The message may have modulated over time, as
problems and limitations with WebTop became more apparent, but based on the
original post by Paul, the message being received is still the latter. The
assumption is that what you're buying is a fully functional application that
can be modified to suit your needs and which is built on an API that will
let you build your own suite of tools, if you so desire. In reality, you may
as well toss the out of the box application and start from scratch with the
COAPI - use WebTop as an example application. And that is, I believe, just
what Macromedia has done. So now what's being sold *is* the COAPI and
suggestions on how to implement it.
If what you're looking for is a Content Manager, then Spectra falls short.
If what you're looking for is a framework for building Content Management,
then Spectra (or perhaps, more accurately, the COAPI) is a very good place
to start. I think a lot of people, me included, were looking for Content
Management and have ended up doing a lot of programming we didn't expect.
What I think happened is that the balance that was struck between Openness
and out of the box functionality fell on the side of openness for Spectra
because of limited resources available to apply to the WebTop. That's my
opinion based on interactions with the product and the company. It's not
based on any knowledge of what actually occurred, so I could be very wrong.
>>> Spectra seems to have approached the issue of staging and
>>> deploying content
>>> changes on a monolithic level: everything changes all at
>>once. It seems to
>>> be geared toward content changing fairly infrequently, like
>>weekly or
>>> monthly. In my experience, change happens daily, hourly
>>maybe, and is very
>>
>>Wow, again, this doesn't seem like what I've seen at all.
>>But, as always,
>>I'm biased, and I've been using the product for some time.
>>I'm curious why
>>you say that Spectra doesn't work well with content that
>>needs to change
>>often? Did you investigate PLPs and workflows any? Again,
>>using a previous
>>job as an example, we have a scenario where people were
>>writing news stories
>>all day long. Plus, a service syndicated news to the server
>>every hour, a
>>good 20-30 stories each time. The site handles this w/o any problems.
Well, I'm wrong on that point. There's no doubt that Spectra sites can be
updated by the minute. But if you look at sample migration scripts and
discussion of deployment in the Spectra documentation, you get the sense
that the tools you are provided with are provided to handle infrequent and
monolithic updates. The deployment documentation talks about deploying
content and handlers and plp's and object types, etc. Not just the content -
everything. That's what I mean by monolithic. How often will handlers and
PLP's change? Not nearly as often as content.
To get to a simple content deployment process you have to deconstruct a lot
of work and rescript, or script from scratch. My point is there are plenty
of common scenarios that shouldn't need to be custom coded.
Consider a simple scenario where I have two separate servers on two separate
networks - one a staging server for content management and one a live
server. Let's say I want to have one new piece of content a day on the home
page - a single "feature article" piece. I want to create a month worth of
articles in advance on the staging server and be able to preview what the
home page will look like each day of the coming month in advance as I'm
creating it, viewing only the feature article for that day. Each article
will need to be put through an approval workflow and when approved set to
publish. Because I have some other pages on the site that will display all
published articles by category, I only want approved content to reside on
the live server, so nothing that hasn't been approved should get up there.
And I only want an article to appear on the site if it's been on the home
page, so even if it's approved it can't appear in the "view all by category"
section until its publish has come. So, some process needs to review all
content on a regular basis and deploy it to the live server if it's approved
and time for it to publish.
How common is this scenario? I think it's pretty common. Every site we've
built since 1996 has had this scenario. Yet try to achieve that without
having to write code for a few days with Spectra. All of the out of the box
tools in Spectra come close to providing a solution for this, but none
really hits it and all of them require a pairing down of complexity from the
feature rich but function poor interface. And migration? There is no
facility in Spectra for migration. There are scripts available in the
developers exchange that you can use as a guide.
Some kind of integrated support for managing staging to live server
deployment and managing preview of content really should be considered. What
I'm hearing is that it's a wheel that's being reinvented by a lot of people
implementing Spectra.
And that, with no further ado, is my $0.02. Thank you and have a pleasant
tomorrow.
Ed McLaughlin
SVMedia
940 South Ave West
Suite D
Westfield, NJ 07090
ph 908.789.4200
fax 908.789.4266
http://www.svmedia.com/
Strategic Internet Business Solutions
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