Content Canvas

BETA TESTERS: If you've come looking to be a beta tester, the form is here

This is not a sales page and is not trying to be one. This just a quick info page I put up about a product I'm working on, seeing as a few people were asking about it.

IMPORTANT! Seeing as I will need feedback and some nice people to test for me, I'm going to give out free beta copies to people on my list! So, add your name to the mailing list below if you don't want to miss the window...

Also you can follow me on Twitter and FriendFeed to get micro-updates on development.

Content Canvas is the cleanest, most configurable website platform I have seen. (And I have both seen and built many). It has been (and is being) built with these ideas in mind:

• It should make your attempts to utilise it for making money online as easy and seamless as possible and should automate as much as possible without being a spam engine. I hate spammy AdSense sites.
• It should be fully prepared out of the box so you can upload it and get building, but not stand in your way if you don't like something.
• You should be able to lay out and construct your website your way. Whatever you want wherever you want it to be.
• It should be pretty and easy to use. I hate ugly things. My favourite things are pleasant, easy to look at and work with me, not against me.
• If you want to peel back the hood and make changes, it should give you ultimate power to make things work the way you want them to work.

So there you go. This page will become an announcement page once I hit beta, but there is some work to do yet. It will be ready when it's ready, but with the progress that has been made, that shouldn't be too far off. After the form below (subscribe to be notified when Content Canvas becomes available) are some miscellaneous features, notes and points of interest about the system.

• An earlier version of the system already runs Graphics District and Style Audit. Note the extremely different layouts and designs!
• Out of the box (not that there will be a box), it will come pre-configured with a big host of ready-to-use options so you can get right into building up your site as quickly and painlessly as possible.
• If you want get down and dirty and really change the way your site works, everything is configured under the hood with XML files, so as long as you have the documentation handy, you can simply change the configurations around to suit your needs. Most people should not have to do this though unless they really want to. The out-of-the-box configuration should be enough. But if you do want more, Content Canvas gives you unrestrained power to reshape it into what you want it to be.
• Skins and Themes are a redundant concept. Simply change the templates and/or apply your own CSS.
• Content Canvas is as SEO friendly as you want it to be. If you don't like something about the html, open a template and change it.
• Under the hood (using those XML files I mentioned), the system uses "workflow" configurations to control what kind of content can be created, how it moves between drafted and published, how it is approved, what happens when it changes (does someone get emailed?) and more. So if you come up with a really crazy new idea, you can make it happen without having to do any programming.
• A basic process that is being built into the product (again, configurable!) will be extraction of content from other websites using a set of successive form get/post operations. Tied to the aforementioned workflow engine, this means that you can have instant extraction and inclusion of content from ezinearticles.com, YouTube, MetaCafe, Flickr, any site indexed by Google, or anything really. Out of the box, expect the ability to grab from all your favourite public content sites, review for inclusion, control where they go and so forth. All with just a few clicks and the ability to modify any of that content before it goes live.
• Every page has a publish and expiry date, which means you can schedule anything to appear or disappear whenever you choose.
• Everything you ever do is preserved. Content Canvas retains a full version history of all your changes, so you'll be able to revert any mistakes you make with ease. Because of this, it also knows if you ever change a URL, so I'll be putting in an automatic 301 redirect for requests to pages whose URLs have changed, to point the browser at the new location, if any.
• The system currently has inbuilt support for MS SQL Server and SQLite (It will be easy to add MySQL and others). But yes, you read right; SQLite support. This means that Content Canvas has full database support without having to pay for, or worry about configuring, a full-on database as would normally be required. SQLite has been demonstrated to comfortably handle hundreds of thousands of requests per day and can theoretically do millions. Personally I have witnessed it serving up data to several thousand unique visitors per day on my own sites without blinking an eye.
• What else? Hmm... community features enroute very shortly. The system already has base support for multiple users and permissions, which means adding community support is just a matter of building some extra bits you can plug into your site. Oh yeah the current setup also means you can easily have your content people log in with their own credentials, create or update content and have those changes not go live until you approve them. All part of that workflow system I mentioned. Sounds complex but the way it materialises is not difficult or messy at all.