Web Content Editing is Fun Again

I began my web content management journey way back in April of 2000 when I joined Interwoven, one of the early pioneers of Web CMS. Back in those days I was a Sales Engineer, and my job was to provide product demonstrations of how WCM would empower business people to free themselves from the "webmaster bottleneck" by empowering everyone to author.

A Web CMS demo back in 2000 wasn't nearly as fun as it is now. I didn't talk about personalization, or multichannel delivery, or website testing. Instead I spent the vast majority of my time showing my customers and prospects how to create and edit content. The concept of empowering the so-called "non-technical user" to edit content was pretty revolutionary for the time. Interwoven made the wise decision to resell Ektron's famous eWebEditPro editor - the first true WYSIWYG editor. Ektron's editor was fantastic, even back in 2000. It gave users the editing tools they needed, with the ability for administrators to lock down certain functions like changing text color, size, etc. Ektron's editor was by far the best editor in the market, and the smart Web CMS companies who re-sold enjoyed a competitive advantage at the time.

But something happened - the death of ActiveX.

Ektron's eWebEditPro was great because it was a native application housed inside of Internet Explorer using ActiveX. But as alternative browsers and platforms emerged, ActiveX went away. Next generation editors were built using DHTML and JavaScript, and while they didn't require ActiveX, they were a step backwards in usability and functionality. Interwoven switched to TinyMCE, which was decent but a big step backwards from eWebEditPro.

As time marched on, the Web CMS discussion moved beyond editing content into content delivery, and the content editing discussion went away. My demonstrations would spend a few minutes showing the basics of editing but I would quickly move into fun stuff like personalization and website testing. But the reality is that for most Web CMS users, content editing is still where you'll spend most of your time. As CMO, I'm a heavy Ektron user - editing product content, writing blog posts, etc. I'll be honest - my editing experience with Ektron hasn't always been entirely pleasant. We had embedded an editor from another company, and it hasn't kept up with the times. But that has changed with Ektron 8.6...

I'm happy to announce that editing content is fun again! I've been using Ektron 8.6 for a few months now and it has completely transformed the content editing experience.

It's real WYSIWYG. Since the days of eWebEditPro, editors have been more WYSIUWYG (what-you-see-is-usually-what-you-get). Due to the way the new editor is implemented using HTML 5, you really are seeing exactly what you'll see when you publish.
It's FAST. The new editor loads almost immediately, so I can quickly start editing.
It handles copy+paste incredibly well, including content from Microsoft Word. This was something eWebEditPro was really good at.
It's got great support for CSS styles, ensuring users like me don't violate our style guides.
It works on mobile devices. Just last weekend, I found a spelling error on ektron.com, and I was able to VPN in to my network and fix the problem right on an iPad. Pretty awesome!
It's contextual. The UI is simple because it only shows options that make sense for what you are working on. For example, you won't see list formatting options unless you are working with lists.

I really, really like the new editor in Ektron 8.6. It's the best editor I've used in nearly a decade - and I've pretty much tried them all. If you are an Ektron customer on an older version, you need to upgrade. There's lots of other great stuff in 8.6, but the editor alone is worth the time investment to upgrade. Now, if only there were an editor that could write blog posts for me automatically... :)

We'll be posting a working demonstration version of the editor shortly, and I'll update this post with the link when its ready. In the meantime, if there are any questions I can answer for you - let me know.

Happy editing!