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Comment by cdevroe | Hacker News Reader

p8952: Barley is built ontop of Code Igniter and jQuery. We're thinking of open sourcing our Editor but our API is very, very simple. Also, syncing via GitHub will be coming soon. Revision control is something we've been thinking about with the Editorially team. They've got that down and we'd love to build that in.

A promo video is tough for such a thing. Something that is fun to watch and isn't a 30 minute screencast of me eating chips and drinking beer. Any suggestions?

We don't nuke any content. You can take it with you.

Thanks for the feedback even if you didn't care for it. We really want to make something people like so perhaps if one day we can win you over we'll be doing something right!

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I think you're trying too hard to jump onto the "ProductX FOR HACKERS!" (Or Developers) market. Such people simple are not interested in paying $18 a month for a blogging system when you could get multiple VPS for that price which can host not only your (Open source and truly hackable) blogging engine but also every other project you have.

If you were selling this to another market it would probably look a lot better.

p8952 You're absolutely right. Our end game is to compete with 1&1. But to get there we need developers to help end users get their sites online. As Barley becomes a more well-rounded product we hope to bridge out of the developer market and go straight to small businesses.

Do you think we'd be better off allowing Developers to use this free and only pay for their customer's sites? Or only if our app were open source it'd be appealing?

cdveroe: A promo video is tough for such a thing. Something that is fun to watch and isn't a 30 minute screencast of me eating chips and drinking beer. Any suggestions?

No need for attitude, you asked for feedback. That being said:

- You call Barley an editor when in reality its just service, and expensive one at that. - Barley is marketed for developers, but in essence is a closed system that doesn't allow for modification or developers to add new functionality.

Honestly the product looks pretty good the design and available themes are decent and I understand why the concept behind barley can be useful for some people but I think you are targeting the wrong audience; developers like to tinker; barley doesn't seem to be designed to easily do that.

My advice, remarket it as a blogging platform for designers.

allanmacgregor: No attitude at all! If only you knew my humor (which is poor) you'd know that I was being sarcastic about me doing a 30-minute screencast and it turning out poorly. :-)

I think you're making some great points. I'm a developer myself. And I like to tinker. But I like to tinker with the parts of the tools that matter to the user (my personal preference). For instance, I love GitHub. It is an incredibly useful tool. But I can't change GitHub.com or edit the way it works. With Barley I think the parts that can not be changed by developers (right now, the API is about it) is the part that developers wouldn't care to change. It is a vanilla CRUD system. That's it. But the editor, templates, and the way users interact with site content is all customizable by people. A great example is our Cypress theme. http://github.com/plainmade/cypress -- It allows people to manipulate data and forms and images in ways I've never seen another CMS do. And that is at the template level.

Thanks so much for your feedback Allan.

I think you're making a lot of assumptions about developers based on your own personal preferences. Have you reached out to other developers to get their feedback? I realize that posting here is one way to do that, but there are a lot of developers who don't post here.

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