TypeRoom, Edit Your Own Website Instantly

TypeRoom, not what I had envisioned when I first heard the name. I, for reasons unknown even to myself had psychologically supposed it to be just another program to type text documents such as ThinkFree.  Founded by Reilly Sweetland, TypeRoom turns out to be a remote content management system that focuses on simple, scalable and innovative solutions to common web content management problems. In addition to the editing features offered by TypeRoom Lite, TypeRoom Professional will offer a full CMS toolset that will deliver a powerful, scalable yet easy to use website management experience. (TypeRoom Professional is coming soon.)

TypeRoom is the brainchild of Reilly Sweetland who, as the story goes, apparently had an illuminating inspiration of how to automate the installation of CMS allowing it to be used without requiring the manual labor of either an install process, or complex migration of hosting accounts. My being to some extent lazy, anything that eliminates manual labour and speeds up a project design process has to be a good thing as I envision it.

TypeRoom then became a collaborative effort of ideas, an innovation driven by the team’s excitement as to how it could revolutionize the way people think about content management systems. The scheme took shape, as the story continues, over the course of almost a year with the addition of Ian Silber’s design and project management, Joren Matthews front-end JavaScript and CSS, and Matthew Rosetta’s infrastructure and back-end development skills TypeRoom continued to develop.

As assured on the home page, “TypeRoom Lite is a website editing tool that allows you to edit a website in seconds.” Once you have made the changes to your site, you have three options to initiate the changes; Instant Publish, Email or Download your changes and files you added.

According to the TypeRoom team, “TypeRoom CMS lives on one server, but publishes the actual website to a remote server where the site is ultimately hosted.” They continue by stating that, “Your website lives on a live production server, but the advanced website editing tools live on a separate, more powerful server. Changes that are made on this more robust CMS server are then published to the production web server.”

No Programming Required

As TypeRoom denotes, “To set up a website on TypeRoom Professional, no programming is required.” However, they also offer advanced users who are into a more creative mood to have access to special functionality scenarios at the template code level allowing their creative juices to freely flow. TypeRoom further notes that, “One of our key design principles of TypeRoom is adopted from the Ruby on Rails philosophy: convention over configuration.”

As I delved further in to define what TypeRoom could actually do as opposed to what it proposes, I did note that during the sign-up process you are only able to create an account if you reside in the US. After a quick communiqué with CEO, Reilly Sweetland, he has informed me, that the International signup will be included in the next product update.

Will there be a user fee for TypeRoom Professional? I have not been able to research any details to define a definitive answer and have taken the opportunity to re-contact Reilly in respect to that subject. However, I did find the following information about TypeRoom in general on the site wherein it states, “TypeRoom was and is bootstrapped from the experience, finance and infrastructure of Internet Simplicity.” While the latter is not a definitive answer to the question about user fees for TypeRoom Pro it does give insight as to how TypeRoom Lite is free.

Conclusion

Being a long-term addict of Adobe Contribute, formerly Macromedia, at $169.00 US for the software package, I see some advantages and disadvantages to anyone paying the $12.00 per month for a TypeRoom Instant Publish account. While a onetime fee for software is advantageous price wise, with TypeRoom a site administrator apparently can make changes instantaneously from any computer without the need for software installation, or heading back to the office for what may be a minor alteration. The downside is the costs per year of $144.00 as compared to a onetime fee for software, which makes the whole process a personal choice based on need.

I did complete a test on one of my customer static websites, found both the email, and download options to be fast and efficient. I did not test the Instant Publish option at this time, as I really had no changes to make. That having been said, I found that while the download file did include the changes I made for test purposes the page header and navigation icons were missing. To ensure the error was not on my part I made two separate tests with the same results each time. As noted in the FAQs of TypeRoom, under website compatibility, “Generally speaking, TypeRoom Lite will work with any HTML web page that is not built with frames and that contains HTML text.” That would perhaps explain my dilemma and hopefully it would be something the team at TypeRoom will attempt to rectify in future upgrades.

I should note that I did the exact same tests on my wordpress blog and everything came out intact. Based on the latter results, I personally will continue to use my Adobe Contribute at this time but I do look forward to testing TypeRoom Professional in hopes that it will be able to work with static sites with frames as well as those without. That would make TypeRoom a definitive must have in any design arsenal, until then I see it as worth continuing to monitor its progress before making a final cut and dried conclusion.