Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Mail-to-Weblog in Manila

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Ok, don’t get me wrong, this is cool and all. And thank you Jake sincerely for continuing to crank out upgrades to Manila. But I once again just want to gently urge the consideration of these features that were originally to be released in June…

  • The news item editing user interface has many new options including: the ability to enable or disable posting of new comments, limiting to a specified number of comments, an option to receive comments and Trackback pings in email.
  • Support has been added for multiple departments.
  • Summary feature allows Manila site editors to easily create longer news item posts, which are linked to from the home page.
  • A new admin page allows managing editors to restrict access to areas of the site based on membership level (member, editor, managing editor, etc).
  • Each Manila site now has an events page, viewable by managing editors, which displays a log of recent events in the site — recent member log-ins and sign-ups, news aggregator scans, comments, trackback pings, etc.

    I know many of the promised improvements have been made, and again, I appreciate the efforts. And I know that the education realm is not the highest priority. But the ones listed above are the ones central to improving Manila for classroom uses, especially the ability to restrict access based on membership level. And I still believe that if Userland is interested, they can make serious inroads into the education area as a CMS first and Web log maker second.

    • Comments

    1. Sam D says

      don’t forget the ability to have members be able to sign up with out the id having to be an email address (a big deal in some schools perspective for student sites)

    2. Al Delgado says

      It may be worth bring up the issue at the “Bird of a Feather” meetings around the major blogware offerings at BloggerCon. According to the Userland site, the mailing address for the company is in MA. I imagine the “new” president and CEO of Userland will be attending. If not ask, Dave Winer 😉 (I think)