What’s available?

We are hard at work documenting the PageSeeder platform, along with creating and testing code samples plus plenty of example solutions and extensions available through our <Developer Resource> pages.

These pages are not complete but new material is being added almost daily, so keep checking back or contact us if you need help with a specific issue.

Some Background

All developers know that getting documentation right is both difficult and important but compounding the pressure is the fact that our product is a publishing platform. While your patience is appreciated we hope not to stretch it too thin. In the meantime, we thought that some context may help to explain how our software is so solid but our documentation incomplete.

It's 10 years since PageSeeder won IBM's Java Brainwave prize at the World Wide Web 7 conference.  In that time we have implemented PageSeeder solutions across a range of industries but about 18 months ago we had some important realizations. Firstly, we felt that the rise of wikis and blogs made it clear that collaborative, web-based solutions were the publishing architecture of the future. The good news for PageSeeder was that while there are plenty of low cost and enterprise solutions on the market, there are very few supporting the rich XML required for complex publishing applications. The bad news for PageSeeder was that the people we were speaking to were particularly uninterested in the word "architecture".

This lead to our second realization, that the people who understand the value of PageSeeder are developers. This is simply because they are the people who recognise the possibilities in being able to quickly create editing environments for arbitrary XML structures, easily integrate third party applications into any workflow or manage endless permutations of  document versions and variations. So while making PageSeeder more developer-friendly seemed like a great idea, it was not a trivial exercise taking an application and turning it into a platform.

One major change that we made was to add a completely new presentation layer to PageSeeder. Based on standards such as XML, CSS and simple XSLT, we were able to make both the interface extremely easy to customize and greatly reduce the complexity of PageSeeder for developers. The result, our multi-MVC architecture is explained in the diagram below.

So far these changes to our strategy and software seem to have genuinely delivered value. We are starting to see our partners create solutions in unthinkable timeframes or with ifunctionality impossible to deliver with conventional publishing technology. The only issue is that it has also left us with the considerable task of writing great developer documentation for a platform that provides end-to-end publishing solutions including XML editing, document review, workflow, multiple delivery mediums and much more. We won't be long!