Introduction

Another CMS? That's right. After years of fighting with the limitations of drupal, plone, and all the rest, we decided we needed to just write our own. We know what works for users, and we've seen what gets in the way of users. A user doesn't want to care about any of the complexity, so we need to make it drop dead easy for someone to add a message blurb to a home page for all users to see, or to update a company birthday list, or to manage a set of documents for a department. These are only a couple of use cases, but Easel has already proven effective in those cases, and the users never had to worry about how to do it, they just did it.

Roadmap

Easel has a baseline of functionality that fits an intranet model. Now we're going to add the community plumbing to make it easy to run a public site, be it a blog, brochure page, or whatever else we can throw at it.

Here's how we see the road ahead of us:

Version 1.0 (today)

• Pages
• Users
• Groups
• Roles
• Documents (file uploads)
• Document groups
• Messages (front page blurbs)

Version 1.1 (next)

• Permalink URLs to pages
• Page comments
• Page trackbacks
• Link as a content type, for menu placement
• Usability enhancements
• IFrame as a content type
• Public user role with limited rights
• Page-level toggle of ShowInMenu?

Version 1.2 (???)

• Sidebar elements managed through the web
• Pages and Folders may have their own Sidebars
• Portlets for embedding other pages/functions within a page and/or sidebar

Version 2.0 (real soon now)

• Themes
• Basic scheduling / event handling
• Built-in search engine
• Form creator, with local storage and/or email delivery of results
• Sitemap generator

Version 3.0 (sometime down the road)