Prismic.io goes live | Hacker News Reader

Prismic.io goes live

prismic.io

46 pointsDoublon51 comments

A few things. I would expect a writing application to have incredible copywriting. You have to out-write the writers!

Here are some examples where the text could be improved, though really the whole page needs to be rewritten using the inverted pyramid.

1. "Api" should be "API".

2. "You're the skilled developer, so why would it be ok to settle for technical constraints as soon as there's manageable content involved?" is awkward. I actually don't know what you're pitching. What is manageable content? Why use a fill verb like "involved" instead of something concrete?

3. "prismic.io helps you make all your content adaptable to all possible designs." is passive. "prismic.io adapts your content to..." who knows.

4. "All possible designs" is clearly impossible.

Second, I still don't know what this does after reading the homepage.

Third, the title of this post was too vague. Maybe that was beyond your control. Did you submit it?

Fourth, almost all the graphics are not related to the application. Show don't tell!

Thanks for the valuable feedback. Here is a question, do you think the following explains well the product?

"prismic.io is a different approach to content management. It features a Writing Room for content writers to author and manage content, and a Content Query Api for developers to integrate managed content into any website or app."

Again, please spell API correctly. It's an acronym, not a word.

Second, your jargon is for yourselves. You need to speak in the language of your customers.

1. What is a Writing Room?

2. What is a Content Query API?

3. What is managed content?

Third, don't advertise your writing. "prismic.io is a different approach to content management" should be obvious and left unstated.

By the way, this customer testimonial is not helping you. I already feel exhausted thinking about how much work it will be to use you. http://www.elastic.io/blog/82796857416/why-we-chose-api-base...

I think the idea is that you expose the content through an API which can be inserted anywhere.

Prismic.io, an API for content.

Prismic.io is a content management system that only publishes through an API. Let your writers focus on writing and your developers and designers can focus on layout.

"It features a Writing Room for content writers to author and manage content"

I don't know why I'm supposed to want a Writing Room. What makes it more desirable than the post entry pages I'm used to? I think a brief explanation of what value the Writing Room adds would be helpful.

"a Content Query Api for developers to integrate managed content into any website or app."

This should be another sentence and may not be considered a feature depending on who your target is. Also, "integrate managed content" is a little hard to understand. Maybe "embed content" instead.

I still have no idea what you're doing. Are you trying to be a middle-man between writers and content farms?

I really hate this kind of comments. It wouldn't hurt to be a little constructive while criticising someone's work.

What's not constructive about it? He's literally giving sentence by sentence grammatical feedback...I'd be pretty happy to get advice like that.

Don't want to derail offtopic here, but it's really just in the delivery. It came off a tiny bit pretentious to me.

Normally, yes, but their first language doesn't seem to be English. Might be reason enough to temper things a bit.

I will definitely consider the criticism on tone. However, there can be no slack for English as a second language. They are marketing in English to a market of writers. In any vertical of creatives, you really must outdo your market. They need to get sharp quickly.

Agree, criticism is good, but constructive delivery is better both for the criticized and the community at large.

It's frustrating as this product looks like a great idea and looks well done, but you're leaving out all the important bits of information that I'd want to know immediately.

Do I have to request the the content from prismic with every request? Is it done client or server side? What kind of caching will I be able to do my end? What happens when you go down?

That website and especially the video are terrible at communicating (pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, arghhhhhh). I thought it was because I was watching it without sound. Turns out there is no sound.

It visually looks great, but the content itself is practically useless, classic style over substance.

And the API documentation is bad. What does the first section of the documentation even mean?

/api is the single endpoint of your content repository. You can learn and browse everything else from there. You should never forge any API URL in your code, as all usable forms (that define what URLs you can build) are available in /api (and the URLs might change as features get rolled out).

I (finally) found the api which is hidden in the help menu of all places and kinda can guess what you're supposed to do, but I think you've a few rough edges to sand off in the usability.

Gratz on the launch, but get someone in to help you write the copy and overhaul those API docs.

We've answered most of your question in our blog, take a look at https://blog.prismic.io

It is very hard to talk technical specificities on the homepage while staying understandable for everyone. There is a big room for improvement for sure (and that's what we're targeting), so thanks for your feedback.

Also we'll keep working on our API and development kits documentation, any help is appreciated.

Our API has a cache forever semantics explained here https://blog.prismic.io/UzQYNwEAAGIjZ3UZ/immutable-documents...

It is a Restful API, that's why there is a single entry point, all follows programatically from there.

Take this as a positive criticism. Good looking website but it me took too long to get it. Not really sure if I still fully got it.

The site doesn't really doesn't say what it is. "Manage your content in one place. Display it your way. Using your favorite technology. prismic.io is a different approach to content management." - all that seems like filler text to me.

I watched the video. It was way too complex. All the close up shots, error messages, etc. Make it simpler.

btw. I wouldn't go searching answer to API questions in a blog.

Can you help me understand exactly what this does, and how it is better than basic CMS? (not being a brat, I'm actually curious. It's just that I just couldn't quite figure it out by reading the website at a quick glance, which you could also take as feedback I guess)

Imagine you want to build a hotel booking app, with content scattered throughout the site. But because it's an app, it doesn't make sense to build out from a CMS (in the good old "This needs editable text, let's use Wordpress as the base!" way).

If you did you'd end up with many one-line bits of text that can be edited, out of context. Well, Prismic doesn't provide context AFAICT, but it does provide much nicer writing tools.

Beyond that I don't have a great understanding yet. I can't see how you'd associate new text with objects in your app (or even if they should be maintained outside); it doesn't handle the generate-URLs-on-the-fly-from-my-routing-system so they don't break when URLs are re-structured...

..or where assets are stored, or (if it's actually for longer-form writing than I'm considering) why you'd choose it instead of Wordpress.

I like the UI, I like the concept, but like you I'm struggling to think laterally enough for the use-cases.

I think the main difference it that _you_ display the informations (instead of modifying a template).

I would say: - You write your content in a WYSIWYG like editor (no need to build a new one) - The content is structured: you explicitly define which kind of information you want (the editor will be adapted accordingly). - It provides an API to get your informations. So you can build a website using your techno (say Ruby on Rails) which fetches the content from prismic.io. - There are also development kits to make this part more easily. - More technical: it's cache friendly. An URL can be cached infinitely, the content it returns will never change.

By the way you can use prismic.io to manage the content of an existing website or mobile application.

maybe this blog post can help https://blog.prismic.io/Ux-QjgEAAGMGit8h/writing-room-and-co...

Put simply, it is a backend called "Writing Room" for managing and structuring content, and an Restful API for developers to integrate this content in any technology (websites or apps).

So the pitch is, it's a managed CMS backend that gets your content-creators working immediately while you dev the rest of the site. Then you just run queries to pull the content.

Not a bad idea; worth checking out if you're in the market, I figure.

I hate this trend that startup homepages seem to be going through. They don't seem to actually explain what their product is. All I can see from this page are a load of assertions that either:

A) It's not the same as thing X B) It's better than thing Y, because of Z C) Their Q (which is part of their product) is really really good!

To someone landing on the page, that doesn't tell me what they do on a grander, more abstract scale, it only gives me a pinhole view of parts of their app, and thus prevents me from seeing the bigger picture. I'm sure the product as a whole is great (after all, I know each part is great), but I still have no idea what the product as a whole does!

I've read the FAQ, and I still can't quite figure out what this is offering. Can anyone condense this into a single paragraph (or better, sentence) that describes concisely, and completely what prismic does? I really can't fathom it from their website...

We're working on a different website for explaining the approach of the product.

Do you think that the following fails at explaining the idea of the product?

prismic.io is a different approach to content management. It features a Writing Room for content writers to author and manage content, and a Content Query Api for developers to integrate managed content into any website or app.

The paragraph you've posted there is very helpful - it gives me more of an idea of what the product as a whole does, and it does sound really quite interesting!

Even doing something like including that at the top of the current website would work wonders for giving an explanation before delving into finer details.

I think it's a bit like Wordpress. But instead of showing content on web pages like Wordpress does, Prismic exposes content via API's. So you create and manage your content hierarchy, and then developers access it from a mobile app or website via the API.

Ah, that does sound interesting! Thanks for the more concise explanation!

I'd like to see an open source version of this. I like the API centric approach to site building, but I don't want some third party to have access to all of my content in one place.

Content repositories have been around for quite a while. At least Apache Jackrabbit has a RESTful API: https://jackrabbit.apache.org/

(for a binding to that API, see for example https://github.com/jackalope/jackalope-jackrabbit)

you have to try http://getcockpit.com ...simple but powerful

What are the SEO implications of this? I tried looking at their site (since they built it with their tech) and at the FAQ but couldnt find an answer. Is the content pulled via AJAX after page load? Or is it pulled server-side on the initial request?

I'm not the prismic.io developer but I believe it depends on you - how you fetch the content fragments from prismic.io. We are doing it on the backend, so it's perfectly searchable by Google ;) See here - http://www.elastic.io/blog/82796857416/why-we-chose-api-base...

This is a cool idea that I think a lot of Digital agencies need. I can't think of how many projects I've lead where we had to build a custom cms for a design that needed to be pixel perfect and was hard to do in either Wordpress or an Enterprise CMS.

However, I think your own website does a poor job of communicating what it does. The language of "display content your way" is very vague and it takes a lot of digging to figure out what it is that you are offering. Your target audience is not the general non-technical user, your target audience is the Technical Lead or Software Architect or programmer that is actually building the website. They are going to be the one that says use this instead of Wordpress or some Enterprise sized CMS.

My suggestions are:

1. Put screenshots of the product immediately on the home page (instead a blank desk, pencils, plants... what is that?).

2. Describe precisely what it is: a new type of CMS that eliminates templates and delivers content as a service to your own custom front end. Everyone hates CMS templates so I think you can strike a chord there. I'm not a copywriter so someone can probably spruce that statement up. I actually echo some of the other commenters statements in that you really ought to have a copywriter look through your content on the website and focus it a bit more. I think the writing/copy on the site is weak in describing the product and needs to be much more technical and specific since your target audience is different.

From what I can make out:

1. Define all document types (document metadata and structure) in their custom JSON.

2. They build pretty looking CRUD forms based off the JSON so non technical content writers can fill in and manage content.

3. Expose all documents via a REST API with a bespoke query language.

4. Allow content to be edited collaboratively and changes to be scheduled / buffered.

That's about it, actually. Would work very well when I build a site for my mum's chocolate shop.

You get the idea roughly, although use cases are likely to go beyond that, but your mum's chocolate shop sounds like a great case to start with! :)

Here is more details in video about how to get started: https://developers.prismic.io/documentation/UjBaQsuvzdIHvE4D...

And here more about how to develop: https://developers.prismic.io/

Have fun!

Or maybe if I wanted to build my own online newspaper. I'd set up the document types, and ask my writers to manage content, while I worked on presentation and display.

Could even build my own Mashable or The Verge off this. I think the biggest draw is an alternative to Wordpress or, god forbid, Drupal. You can set up content structure and work the presentation off a queryable REST api.

A few suggestions:

* Make it possible to "Tab" between fields, same for using "Cmd-Return", "Cmd-A", ...

* Inserting an image is really ankward, as soon as I upload it, I expect it to be in the article/product/... but it's not, I have to "Select" it, and then choose some kind of dimensions, and the UI/UX for it is not user-friendly, I think you should show the image in the article images sections, and then have small icons for differents sizes, or just when clicking the image, then we can edit it.

* When you use the terms "Publish", "Live now", ..., I expect to see something publicly accessible, like even some kind of raw template of a website, or show me the API urls, because now I'm like hitting the "Publish" button and then nothing seems to happen.

* Also when clicking "Publish", "publish now" should be the default (eg: always have defaults for select inputs)

Otherwise it looks really good and I like the ideas.

Do you plan on translating it? Also, you say it's free, but then there is a billing section, etc..., do you have a idea how much it will be?

There are a lot of interface optimization coming, that will indeed make your life even easier progressively. Those optimizations are all easy to make, it's all a matter of building the right ones. :)

There will definitely be support for several languages in the writing-room too.

For our pricing all of the answers to your questions are here: https://prismic.io/pricing

Thanks for liking it! :)

First impression of the writing room is that it's suffering from classic 'mystery meat' navigation. I think it would be a hard sell to busy clients who hate learning new interfaces.

I'd love to see footage of the user testing on this. I might be wrong but I can imagine many a furrowed brow on initial exposure.

Update - Either I'm really dumb or adding a picture to a post is rather confusing.

I was really expecting a completely stellar UX to be the main selling point. It's a very pretty UX but it's not immediately intuitive. Which leads me to wonder what the main selling point of this actually is. I kind of like the idea of decoupling content from the code that generates the website but that's an abstraction that many will struggle with.

It's not really any worse than what we're currently expecting content authors to work with (Wordpress et al) - but it's not significantly better either. So it lives or dies on the value of the decoupling - which I'm struggling to feel is a big enough win.

By the way, in another HN thread, we posted a $60 discount code "HNApril15" to thank HN community for this awesome and constructive feedback.

I have been using this approach internally for quite a while, a CMS that exposes all content through its API and then websites, mobile apps, etc. that consume the API. Taking it a step further you can build libraries in your favorite programming language against your API. This reduces building a Rails, Node.js, iOS, or Android app down to mostly design implementation.

There's no mention of embedding or "white labeling" prismic within other applications. Is this possible? For example, within product X I need to manage quite a bit of content, but would rather not build in a CMS. Can we integrate Prismic to do the content management parts?

This is a great use case for prismic.io!

Since all of your content is structured and delivered through your API, you can simply pull it from your application, and use the content the way you want. Look at me take an existing Bootstrap site, and inject content in it: https://blog.prismic.io/Ux-CMgEAAFwI9kFg/turn-a-bootstrap-th... (here in PHP, but you can use any technology you want). Here, it's a static Bootstrap site, but if your application was more complex, it wouldn't me more complicated to embed prismic.io powered content!

Maybe I wasn't very clear. What I'm interested is the reverse - within my application, using the Prismic UI to author content, that I then expose outside the application. I don't want my application's users to know or care about Prismic - they're just using my application. Then I can take the content they've authored and use it like normal either within my app, or external to my app, for example.

I would suggest to clean up landing page and clearly explain what is prismic.io. I tried to figure out that from the landing page, but no luck. And if you are not native English speaker - use that in your advantage. Write short sentences.

We're working on a new website that should do better at explaining what is prismic.io, with much fewer text. Thanks for your suggestion.

Anyone figure out how to view a site created from scratch that has newly published documents? Not obvious how to view a site as an unauthenticated user.

Or is the API the only way to consume content published on a repository/site?

Indeed, you need to set up your application yourself, with your technology of choice. You want to watch that "Getting started" video to get a better understanding of how to do that: https://developers.prismic.io/documentation/UjBaQsuvzdIHvE4D...

What kind of guarantees are you providing that a company that will invest itd resources in creating content on your platform wont be held to ransom tomorrow by either price hikes or service closures or something else?

Biggest challenge: I thought it was these guys with a new look:

http://getprismatic.com/home

It appears that scrolling isn't working for me. Chrome on a Mac.. Perhaps it's a CSS overflow issue?

Edit: Only when the video is playing

We use Google Drive to collaborate on our content. It's simple but it's free. Why should we switch?

Google Drive is great for writing unversioned content that you don't need to deliver elsewhere and/or manipulate programmatically; I use it myself a lot for this kind of tasks. But if you want your content to end up automatically online or in another application, if you want to keep full control of how it's displayed easily, and if you want to track and plan changes in an advanced way, then it's for sure not the right tool, and prismic.io sounds more like it.

Very cool, congrats

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