Template Library, 2.0 plans
2.0 Gets Closer Early next week, if all goes well, we'll release what will, hopefully, be the last beta before the final version of 2.0! I'm calling it the “Release Candidate” because if it doesn't have any showstoppers it will be the final version of 2.0. At this point we're happy to announce that all paid users of CityDesk 1.0, home or professional edition, will receive a free upgrade to CityDesk 2.0 Professional Edition. Yep, you heard me right. Even if you bought CityDesk 1.0 Home Edition, you'll get upgraded to the Professional Edition when 2.0 ships. Why would we do something nutty like this? Well, I'm forced to admit, it's because the CityDesk Home Edition was a bit of a failure. We wanted to make a cheaper entry-level version of CityDesk, but in the end we made something that was too cheap to support profitably, and which ended up making people worry about article count limits and go to ridiculous lengths to keep their sites under 500 pages. It wasn't fair to sell a crippled version of the product at a price that we simply couldn't maintain, so we're going to stop selling the Home Edition altogether and as a parting gift we'll upgrade every existing Home Edition user onto the Professional Edition. Many people have been asking for a version of CityDesk that can be given to contributors — novice end-users who simply need to create, edit, and delete articles, but for whom designer mode is overkill. So when 2.0 ships we will introduce a new Contributor Edition. This edition is the same as the Professional Edition minus designer mode. Pricing has not been announced but it will be significantly less than the Professional Edition. You won't want to buy the Contributor Edition alone, because there would be no way to set up a publish location (changing publish locations is a designer mode feature). But if you want to set up a site using your own Professional Edition and give it to your Aunt Ethel to maintain, you can get her the Contributor Edition at a lower cost and eliminate the possibility that she'll discover Designer Mode and mess up all your templates by mistake! More details will follow. |
