Thread

So, this is the first CMS ever that had me wondering if I would legitimately ever switch away from EE. Of course, it’s not publicly available for licensing yet, but it is running the new site, Obsessable.com. Something tells me, though, that with the right modules, EE could have similar functionality. I’d love to get thoughts of others.

Here is a great writeup on ReadWriteWeb:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/blogging_dream_team_joins_forc.php

Specifically in terms of the CMS:

The Crowd Fusion blogging platform was built by CEO Brian Alvey and CTO Craig Wood. It is the foundation of the company. Alvey was Jason Calacanis’s less obnoxious co-founder at Weblogs. He built the BlogSmith platform that now powers AOL properties including gossip mega-site TMZ, Engadget and many others. With Crowd Fusion, Alvey and team have tried to take the lessons they’ve learned as some of the most experienced high-scale blog publishers on the web and build an even better publishing system.

What’s so special about it? The system has a built-in RSS reader that team leaders seed with subscriptions (writers can add more at will), it’s easy to push related links from other blogs out onto the published site and the system allows for the management of multiple responsibilities for posts like finding and sizing images, copy editing and more. Obsessable says it is aggregating about 1,000 topical links each day from around the web. It’s all pretty involved but we couldn’t help but be jealous of the publishing interface.

The company has 12 people working in Corporate and Tech departments and so far has around 10 freelance writers covering gadget news on Obsessable. It describes itself as “a new web publishing platform, built to solve the pain points of publishers at scale.” That platform will not be available for licensing for some time.

Will a heavy duty publishing system help this new company challenge some of the biggest blogs on the web? The team involved certainly improves the odds.

Thoughts? Are these features already available, either natively or by using modules, and I just haven’t figured it out yet? 😉

Crowd Fusion sounds cool, but when’s crowd Fusion 2.0 coming out?

Seriously though, given the history of the developers and the type of sites that use their products I doubt if they are going to be selling this cheaply.

And other than a magazine style site I don’t see the value in the whole feed from authors thing is that exciting. Maybe I am missing the point.

Also, Obsessable.com looks about as exciting as a catalog or a classified newspaper section.

No offence to the product in any way as it looks quite good but I can’t really see anything on the two sites that couldn’t easily be done with ExpressionEngine at the moment and a few extensions.

Also the control panel to me anyway looks a little clunky and geared towards a more commerce based site. I could be wrong on that but that’s what it feels like to me.

Looks okay but nothing out of the ordinary and I made my decision long ago to stick with ExpressionEngine for as long as I possibly can 😉 so won’t be switching any time soon I’m afraid.

Best wishes,

Mark

It does look cool but I want to try it before I rejoice.

Have to agree with the previous comments.  It looks great for the kind of product review/catalog site like Obsessable.com seems to be.  But, I don’t see the flexibility of EE in it.  And really, it’s the flexibility of EE that I’m in love with.  The fact that I don’t have to go looking for a different CMS for each feature set. As Christopher already mentioned, it’s not going to be as economical as EE either.  But for the right client/site, it might be a decent fit.

It would be fun to take it for a test drive though.  There are far too few details to make any kind of substantive evaluation of it at the moment.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t mean I was considering a move. All I meant was that it’s the first product that made me go, oh, wow…I wonder if I’m able to do THAT with EE. I like the workflow setup where you can set up a default workflow, or a custom one for an article, and there are checkboxes so you know each one was done, if they don’t have to be done in order. Just the little things like that, I think are kind of neat 😊

I like the workflow setup where you can set up a default workflow, or a custom one for an article, and there are checkboxes so you know each one was done, if they don’t have to be done in order. Just the little things like that, I think are kind of neat 😊

Gotta agree. That did pique my interest as well.  But like I said, the details are vague at the moment to see if their particular integration of it would be useful.

Hopefully EE 2.0 on CI will bring about a lot of creative enhancements to the current EE workflow.

I think for me, personally, before I’d consider any other CMS I’d wait until EE2.0 hits. I have some very high expectations and based on 1.x I’m expecting it from the right company. I’ve been very impressed with EE since I started using it back in 04.

Interesting that both the name and suggested uses seem to be on the idea of creating YET ANOTHER million “portals” where links and reviews and products from ELSEWHERE are combined.

It must be my age showing.

What about the idea of actually creating content from scratch - they used to call it writing.

This is not just a critique of that platform - it might be great for other uses too - but the idea that every web site is just aggregation and that every bloggers is just quoting from elsewhere…..wonder if anyone ever thought about who actually creates the content (and therefore the value) in the first place?

As far as CMS packages, I think there are probably a lot of good ones out there and more to come. But at the same time, those who are heavily investing in time and skills on one platform are unlikely to switch unless there is a really good reason - like one worth hundreds of hours of hard work!

I think there is a good market for LESS capable and complicated CMSes. I teach some classes on Internet Success and talk a lot about CMS…but to be honest with my students, I tell them DIY is usually out of the question. It would be nice for many people to have LESS options, not more.

I think for me, personally, before I’d consider any other CMS I’d wait until EE2.0 hits. I have some very high expectations and based on 1.x I’m expecting it from the right company. I’ve been very impressed with EE since I started using it back in 04.

I’ve been using EE since it was beta back at the end of 2003 (the original pMachine days), and the evolution has been remarkable, both for EE and the company. The core of EE is the template system, followed quickly by stability, security, dependability, flexibility, and a decent learning curve, making EE somewhat unique among affordable CMS apps.

The decision to choose a CMS should be based on a variety of factors which range from features to support to cost to security, and so on. That makes EE an easy choice and allows for the patience needed to wait for EE 2.x.

Can’t remember which announcement site I read about this on but it was very clearly stated that this wouldn’t be available any time soon if ever. It’s the Weblog, Inc. guys, starting a competitive set of topic specific blogs to compete with AOL and this is their new, updated, custom CMS to publish and run those blogs. If I recall correctly, the original Weblogs, Inc. CMS wasn’t available either.

I looked at http://blueflavor.com/blog/2007/dec/03/django-a-flexible-choice-for-y/]Django some time back. And I still like a lot of what people have done with their CMS. Their showcases rock, but sadly I do not have an army of mutant programmers to do my bidding.

I would expecially love to run a site based on Ellington, but since I can’t even find license costs, amd guessing I could never afford it.

Anyway, their are other options out there. I’ve fired up drupal, joomla, phpnuke, the OX server built in blogs, and Wordpress. I keep coming back to EE.

I do agree with what someone above wrote. I don’t think the world needs another content aggregating CMS, or even another CMS period.

I think that we’re all in on the greatest secret on the web. I’ve been out there in the badlands.. floating around the interwebs for some time now. I think a lot of you who have been here for a while are desensitized to how great and innovative this company is. I’ve already shelled out over $350.00 to Rick and the rest of the crew for their outstanding products, insight, and unique market position. I DON’T give my loot to just anyone. Take a step back. These folks are the next market leaders. It took them years of hard work to get where they are, and all the while, they’ve kept the company mission, values and culture as straight as an arrow. Do I support that? I sure do.

Before this gets misconstrued as fanboy-ism though, I’d like to point out the obvious - you can’t be the best at everything.  I dig what these folks have built. Ellis Labs has created a family of products that now have the potential to surpass other content management systems on a completely different level. They’ve cracked open a door to a totally different realm, and I for one am excited to see what’s on the other side. Innovation.

Absolutely agree with James there. No CMS can be everything to everyone but I have to say that ExpressionEngine is pretty much everything I’ve ever needed straight out of the box. If it doesn’t have a function then someone has created an extension, plugin or module to cover it and if not then I can usually come up with something myself.

It’s like e-commerce platforms. You will never ever find one that is everything to all people but ExpressionEngine really is top class at what it does do and that is pretty much most things. Sure it might not have all the fancy admin AJAXness at the moment although that’s coming 😉 I for one don’t really care about clever back-end javascript searches and the like as long as I can get to my data it’s the front-end that matters most to me and ExpressionEngine is the only system that allows me to design a site precisely how I want. I literally can’t ask for more than that.

So whilst it isn’t everything in completeness I would say it is 99.999999% there already.

Best wishes,

Mark