Harmony: Signup and Cost
I don’t know about you but I like to try before I buy. That is why signing up for Harmony will require no payment details. Provide us with a bit of information and you’ll be on your way to the administration area where you can take our baby for a spin.
What exactly are we requiring? All we want to know is who you are and how you would like to login. We have two login options, email with a password or OpenID. Steve and I are both fans of OpenID, so it’s important to us to allow you to use it from the start. The main goal of the signup page was to make it as simple and quick to complete as possible. Below is a screenshot of a piece of the signup form in it’s current state.
Once you have created your account, you’ll be taken to your account’s administration area, where you can start adding sites and users. One of the cool things that we’ve talked about is not charging a dime until a site goes live. Think about it. Administration area use won’t really cost us money, so why should we charge you for it? What will cost us money is the infrastructure and programming necessary to make sure the site you have created is available and speedy once you make it public.
What Will It Cost?
The cat is out of the bag. We are going to charge money for the hard work we put into Harmony. How much? We don’t know yet, but we promise it will be reasonable. Based on experience, we know it can be difficult managing the infrastructure an application like this requires, so the balance is what makes it worth the effort for us and affordable for you.
That is all for this week. Next week we will share what we have done with users. We are taking a bit of a different spin than some applications, so it should start some interesting discussions. That said, don’t feel you have to wait until next week to let loose with some feedback.
I guess only one question after that post: when are you going to let us loose on this…..?
I’ve checked already domains harmonyapp.com because I taught you have something on this site:-).
I’m really waiting for your product.
Have you guys considered establishing a profit cap, at which point the project would be released into opensource? In essence, a buyout point for the community. I struggle between believing that effort should be monetarily rewarded, and knowing from experience that opensource generally makes a better longterm proposition for my customers.
I also value the ability to report bugs in an open tracking system, both from a development maturity and troubleshooting aspect.
I tend to agree with Colin — I agree that one deserves to be compensated for their hard work, but I also think that an open, hackable and customizable platform is almost always in the client’s better interest (and afterall, that’s what truly matters, no?)
There are already a lot of hosted CMS services out there that promise to completely change the way you think about CMS. Our shop has demoed several of these services, and while most of them are very well-built, we still cannot justify paying (even a low cost) for something that doesn’t allow us nearly the same level of flexibility we can get for free with an in-house or open-source CMS.
If a quality CMS that other web shops want to use was your true goal, it would be open-source. But I can definitely understand you wanting a CMS that works exactly your way, and possibly making some money off it. I don’t mean to rain on your parade — I applaud you guys and wish you the best of luck!
… and, all this being said, I will definitely give it a try when it’s out. Who knows, maybe Harmony will finally be CMS nirvana :)
@Roger – Well we aren’t finished with it. We are really in the first third of development. Our goal is to have something that we can use by October/November. It will probably be at least another 3 months after that before we start slowly releasing it.
@Lukasz – Ha. We do own it but haven’t put anything up yet. Intentionally. :)
@Colin – No we haven’t considered that. I really can’t foresee a day that Harmony will be open source. Honestly, the infrastructure that will be setup to run Harmony is not something that you would want to setup and manage even if it was open source. Do your customers really prefer open source, or do you? Reporting bugs in an open tracking system is an interesting idea. We will have to discuss something along those lines more in the future.
@Kyle – Hackable and customizable shouldn’t require access to the source. It’s not that we want a website management system that works exactly our way, but rather that we haven’t found anything that works like the system we created at Notre Dame, which worked and still works really well. Obviously, that system is owned by ND so we are starting over.
As per cost, you still have to pay to host the open source solution. Also, it takes time to upgrade it with new releases and when security issues are exposed. Factor those things together and you probably spend the same maintaining an open source solution as you would paying a hosted solution. Time is more important to Steve and I than money because we can use the extra time to makeup for the cost.
I’m glad you are keeping an open mind though and that you will try Harmony out, as that is the most important thing. The minute you settle for “good enough” is the minute you start dying inside. :) What are you currently using at your shop that seems to be working great for you?
@John: “Hackable and customizable shouldn’t require access to the source” — to a degree, yes. But there have been cases where clients have asked for new features that just wouldn’t be possible if we were using a closed-source CMS. Expression Engine and other CMS platforms makes it possible (though not necessarily pleasant) to build custom modules from within the CMS, but even that can be limiting at times.
Our shop uses Django for 99% of our client work, which makes it trivial to build and deploy custom features from scratch. A fact which, in retrospect, may have spoiled me. We haven’t had to tell clients “the CMS can’t really do X, but I guess it could do Y, which is close enough” since we started using Django. Not having the ability to extend the codebase to meet our client’s crazy demands is pretty much a deal-breaker for me.
…But again, that’s for most projects. Typically we decide what technology to use after meeting with a client. So it’s very possible that for quick & dirty jobs we’ll say “Hmmm, that sounds like a Harmony site to me.”
@Kyle: While it is true that programing your own CMS in a framework such as Django is much more flexible than a hosted, or even distributed open source, solution, I’m always hesitant of solving problems by writing more software. Harmony is intended to be a flexible, simple solution that will meet many of the common needs in managing content. It’s not intended to meet everybody’s needs.
But hopefully we’ll be able to provide an additional option onto the CMS market that people will find valuable. I know there’s nothing out there currently that matches the way that we would like to handle content management.
@Kyle: I would agree with you that Frameworks make it easier to build things from scratch. However, sometimes you can bundle those things together to create a common framework of things you need for many of your clients – which in turn creates more of a CMS. Rolling your own will always be more flexible, no matter what. A CMS simply can’t meet the needs of everyone.
I will say this though. I think Mr. Nunemaker does a great job of giving back to the community through railstips.org and the code he puts out for others to use. Doing that is what helps people build or extend their frameworks.
I see no reason that they shouldn’t build it to fit their needs, then put a price tag on it. I have no doubt the end product is going to be incredible. I also don’t think it’s the clients requesting us to use open source, that sounds like more of a personal preference to me.
Sweet, A new CMS to try out. Joomla works. Not the way I want it to and some of our sites are a headache to go and modify or update. Thankfully they are fairly static and don’t really require to much maintenance.
Looking forward to a url I can click on and sign up and see what there is to see :D