Adobe's Foray into CMS
By Biz Stone
On a recent project I had to design and build templates for thousands of members of the Weblog community Xanga.com. Users wanted to be able to customize their Weblogs extensively. After talking it over with various team members, I made the executive decision that image-based titles, navigation tabs, and other graphic elements would be too limiting and not customizable enough for our needs. Thus, we went for pure HTML instead. With AlterCast, the project would have gone differently.
A recent exploration of Adobe's foray into server-level content management has changed, or rather, totally eliminated, my concerns about the constraints of using images in templates.
AlterCast is imaging server software designed to integrate with existing content management systems and help maintain the ocean of graphics used in e-commerce sites like Amazon.com and Outpost.com. It automates the creation and repurposing of pictures and eliminates the repetitive nature of tweaking and reformatting them for various needs. But I can't help thinking how killer AlterCast is for users of a site-building tool like Xanga. It's like having a team of graphic designers and Webmasters on call.
