A Weblog entry posted on Wednesday, September 12 2007
Reflect: past, present, and future
On Monday we launched a new promotional website for Reflect, our up and coming hosted website solution and content management system. We’re considering this website phase 2 of 3 in leading up to the official release of Reflect at the beginning of 2008. We haven’t talked too much about Reflect in the past, so I wanted to give you a brief history and status update of where we we are in its development.
Why a content management system?
The number one reason we decided to build a content management system was simply because we were totally unhappy with what’s out there in the market today. Yes, we know there are tons out there, and we’ve probably used or tried most of them in the past. And quite frankly, we don’t like any of them. WordPress, and all the other blog engines out there, aren’t bad, but they aren’t content management systems. Trying to make a blog engine a content management system is just wrong. It’s wrong for usability reasons as well as technical. Reflect is more than just a blog engine, but it’s a lot less than the every feature you could ever imagine type content management systems in the market today. With Reflect, we’ve tried to solve the basic problems of launching and managing a website that we believe other systems forget.
Clear Function has lots of experience with content management. We’ve made many custom designed and built systems for our clients and even before starting Clear Function almost two years ago. We have more experience with content management systems than we like to admit to ourselves, and we honestly thought that we’d never be trying to make a system on a mass-market level. Content management systems are plagued with so many issues and inherit problems that trying to tackle one is a bit overwhelming. But, it always came back to the point that we could never find one we actually felt good about using and made sense to our clients. A system that was as easy to set up as it was to create a page. A system that was packed with features, but didn’t try to balance our checkbooks. We think Reflect is just right.
How far do you want to take Reflect?
We’ll be the first to admit that Reflect is not for everyone. In fact, we’ve said from the beginning that we’re not trying to take over the world with Reflect. We decided to build a system that we actually wanted to use and felt comfortable about using for our clients. Some people are going to love it and, no doubt, some people won't. We want to take Reflect to a place where it solves all our problems in developing a website for a client, and in doing so we think we’ll solve the problems for many web designers and developers as well. We want to see Reflect become a great solution for web developers to launch and manage websites.
Why not until 2008?
Reflect still needs a lot of work and we’re continually refining it to have it ready to go by the first of 2008. This is partly because we’re a small company and are self funding the development, but it also has to do with the fact that we want Reflect to simmer a bit and naturally grow. We could rush to get it pushed out sooner, but we think we’d be missing things in doing so.
Private Beta
We’re in somewhat of a private beta right now and will gradually be adding new accounts and web developers to the system. If you’re interested in using Reflect, just shoot us an email or add your email address to the signup form in the footer of the new website.
Stay tuned for more information about Reflect in the coming weeks and months.
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I've been long searching for a CMS that I also feel comfortable for clients to use. At this point, ExpressionEngine has met these needs the best, but the product is lacking the user interface design polish I desire. From what I can tell, Reflect picks up where EE leaves off. The design of your dashboard, in particular, looks fantastic. Nice work.
Geof,
Thanks for the kind words! And, I would agree with you about Expression Engine. They have prettied it up in last couple of months or so when Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain re-skinned the interface, but I still think the organization and how it works is confusing. I know if I find something confusing, then my client who isn't familiar with any CMS is going to be confused. We've spent a lot of time making sure Reflect makes sense to a developer but also the end client. We're really excited about it.
My father wanted a website a few months ago. I told him I'd look into a CMS that he could use, then I would be willing to set it up for him. There are so many content management systems out there, but there were so few that I would be willing to recommend. I couldn't see my father using Joomla, he'd need to buy a book for that! But he doesn't even care about that, he has a goal to accomplish with the website, technology should not stand in the way. I will follow your progress with interest.
Congratulations. This looks outstanding from a design and usability perspective. I'm curious if you have a tie in with the 37signals crew - the Reflect UI shares some common traits with their excellent work ?
Dom, We do not have any tie with 37signals, although we do respect their work and gain inspiration from it. We also get inspiration from Apple's UI work and design philosophy as well as some of Google's innovations and resourcefulness.
Reflect looks like a hosted version of Radiant CMS with more polish and a lot more features, which sounds like a huge WIN to me. Looking forward to the 2008 launch.
Dave,
There might be some similarities to Radiant, but I think you'll find there's a lot of differences as well. One of the major differences is that Reflect uses Liquid for the templating language while Radiant uses XML based tags.
Radiant is a good system, but we'd argue that Reflect is a lot more friendly to non web designers, while Radiant is a lot more technically driven. We've made efforts to make Reflect make sense for both web developers and the end client.
Thanks for you comment.