2:30pm July 14th, 2008 By webon.team
Today we're unveiling a new feature that we've been working on for quite a while: user-created add-ons. These add-ons use the OpenSocial API, an emerging standard for socially-enabled gadgets supported by folks like Google, MySpace, and Yahoo!
What does this mean for you?
If you're a site builder, you'll ultimately have a much larger library of add-ons to use with your site. You'll be able to choose both from the add-ons we develop and from the add-ons shared with the Webon community by developers. In addition, these user-created add-ons can take advantage of user profiles, friends lists, and other social features.
If you're a developer, you can now extend your site's functionality by creating custom add-ons. What's more, you can easily share your creations, giving them a larger audience than they otherwise would have. And because our add-ons use the OpenSocial API, you don't need to learn a proprietary language to create them.
This is all part of our goal of making Webon a user-extensible platform, not one that's defined solely by us. If you'd like to try your hand at creating an add-on, check out this early peek at our Add-On Editor. After you've saved an add-on, it'll be available the next time you edit a site; just select "my add-ons" from the pulldown menu in the Add-Ons window.
Please note: we don't yet support the entire OpenSocial API (version 0.8 to be precise), and we're still working on developer documentation. But we wanted to let you start playing around with the editor so that you could give us feedback.
Enjoy!
Tags: add-ons, philosophy, development, features
6:35am May 1st, 2008 By webon.team
Some of us on the Webon team have been building websites since the mid-1990s. Site-building applications have come a long way since then, but we think all of them are frustrating in one way or another:
- Too specialized: Most site-building apps let you write a blog, or build a site for your wedding, or upload photos from your vacation, or do something else. But if like most people you have more than one interest in your life, you need to learn multiple apps and keep track of multiple accounts. With Webon, however, you can create sites for many different purposes in one place. You can even combine them all into one site with a single uniform style if you want to.
- Too much hassle: Even with all the improvements and innovations that site-building apps have made over the years, building a website can still be a pain. Either you need to jump through hoops to register and configure your site, or it doesn't look the way the app tells you it should. We've tried to remove these hassles: you don't need to register to try out Webon, for example, and you edit your site's content directly on the page in real time.
- Too little control: Many site-building apps limit the ways in which you can customize your site's functionality and appearance. Webon, on the other hand, will allow you to create entirely new add-ons (also known as widgets) and styles if you don't like the ones we provide. Other sites also tend to insert ads or their own branding, which is understandable--they need to make money somehow--but unattractive from a user perspective. We're taking a different approach and have no plans to put ads on sites published on Webon.
By designing Webon to counter these frustrations, we're creating the site-building app we always wished we had. We also have plans for some enhancements that will make Webon sites more powerful than those created with other apps, but we're not quite ready to unveil those yet.
Tags: philosophy, development, features







