Konductor Blog

Just a quick post this time—we recently posted a video on YouTube showing how quick and easy it it to cut the Firefox website over to Konductor, complete with managed menus and styled regions with no modifcations to the code:

Below is all the major steps we took to make this video:

1. Save the site using the “Save Complete” Firefox add on
2. Add editable regions using Adobe Dreamweaver
3. Modify content using the Konductor application
4. Preview the results in Firefox

The video was actually bit over 5 minutes long, but we decided to speed it up a little and get the point across a little faster Also, one of the cooler aspects of the process was that DJ Earworm gave us permission to use “United States of Pop 2009 (Blame it on the Pop)” as the sound track to the video! Big thanks for letting us use your track! Be sure to check out his videos.

So what’s Konductor all about anyways? Why bring another CMS into the mix? How does a designer benefit from using Konductor? These are all great questions that we hear often, and we now have a fancy way of summing up the answers.

Introducing the brand new Konductor promotional video! We’ve worked hard on it, and we hope you like it.

Ok, so I’ll admit it, there’s a few geeks here in the office. Most of us here use Macs, so today was a big day for us with the release of Snow Leopard. Seeing as the Apple Store is not too far away from the office, I decided to head on over and see if I could grab a couple copies to see how the Konductor platform worked on it.

Well, after waiting in line for a few minutes, and then waiting for everyone to stop clapping when the gate to the store raised (not sure what that’s all about) I was able to grab some copies.  The installation went really well; very quick and straightforward.  From there it was time to see how the Konductor tools worked on the OS.

We hear that CS3 doesn’t work with Snow Leopard, but we’re using CS4 so we weren’t too concerned. To our delight, the OS seems really polished and both Dreamweaver CS4 and AIR work flawlessly on it.  So being, both the Konductor Dreamweaver Extension and the Konductor AIR App worked just as expected.  It doesn’t get much better than that, a refined OS that works perfectly with the tools you need.

O’Reilly’s InsideRIA posted a really detailed writeup on Konductor – check it out. It does a very good job at covering Konductor’s features, so if you have been a little curious about some of the finer details of Konductor, this makes for a good read.

The dust has settled. Mouse fingers are bandaged and beginning to heal and the temporary Konductor tattoos are starting to fade. All of this must mean that the Adobe MAX show in San Francisco is over!

First of all, thank you Adobe for the first class show. Second, thanks to all of you who stopped by our booth to check us out. For the over 400 beta testers who signed up at the show, if you have not already been sent the application, you should get it shortly.

Due to the overwhelming response at our booth we did not get a chance to go to many sessions, but a definite highlight for myself as well as our tech team was the research project code named “Alchemy” – created to allow developers to compile C/C++ code to run on AIR. And since our CMS interface is built on AIR, we were instantly excited about tapping into the millions of lines of C/C++ code that could run in conjunction with Konductor. The possibilities are endless!

Stay tuned – we cannot wait to show you what we have in store for 2009.

In order to show you higher quality videos, we decided to start hosting our videos on motionbox, in addition to YouTube. And then HD arrived on YouTube. We also uploaded some new videos that demonstrate some of the features we are working on. Behold…

Image optimization

Image optimization is one of the most requested features we get from both users and designers. In order to upload a large image to a CMS these days, users are expected to resize the images themselves. This takes time, and if they are not tech savvy, it takes training too. In most cases, though, the image tends to get uploaded as is. The image just gets scaled, not resized – this takes the user a long time to upload, and visitors end up downloading huge image too. So here is what we have done:

Form Builder

Another highly requested feature is an easy way to build and manage forms. This is often more complicated than it seems on the surface, as database storage, result aggregation, email responses and the like all have be managed too. This one is still a bit of a work in progress, but here is what we have so far:

More videos are on the way! Plus if you missed our initial platform demonstration a couple of months back, make sure you check it out. (A lot has changed since then though…)

Due to the overwhelming response to the prerelease program – over 500 in 7 days – we have decided to keep the doors open to 500 more. We will be breaking up the users into groups of 50 to 100 over the next few days, with first group of users being sent the AIR application as early as next week. Thanks to all for the amazing response!

The wait is over – kind of. Well at least we have an orderly line forming now.

As of yesterday, October 5th, Konductor announced that it is now giving away 500 pre-release seats for free to the Web professional community. Within 8 hours we had 109 sign-ups from Designers and Developers all over the world! The Konductor Extension for Dreamweaver to allow Designers to easily work with Konductor from right inside Dreamweaver is coming soon.

If you are interested in test driving the future of content management sign up at the top right of this page now!