Decouple your data
By Rick Stratton, founder
Recently I took a call from a prospective Feed.Us customer (please, please feel free to call me directly:414-212-5558).
We discussed the way the Feed.Us content management application works: Feed.Us is a content management service. We store your content and then feed that content to your website or your application.
Traditional content management systems (Wordpress, Drupal, Vignette, DotNetNuke, etc) are hosted on your server with your website. Feed.Us works as a web service. We separate the content from the site. We also separate the content from the template as well. You use CSS, HTML & PHP (or asp or RoR, etc) to build your web pages, no CMS is needed to build pages.
The (hopefully future) customer then said:
"Decoupling data from the application? Genius."
I agree! There are are a number of advantages to keeping content separate from your website (or app, etc).
1. Software/hardware/hosting flexibility. Feed.Us can be used on any website, running any software hosted anywhere. It can be used on cheap Godaddy hosting. It can be used on a Ruby on Rails site.
2. Security & backup. If a Feed.Us-powered site gets hacked, the hacker will not have access to the content management. If the host goes down, the content is stored in a completely separate location. Soon Feed.Us will also store a copy of our customer's content in a completely different location. We also make it easy to download and store locally a file of all your site's content.
3. Content flexibility. Your content isn't restricted to your site. You can manage content on multiple sites. You can use Feed.Us to publish content to an iPhone app or even to Amazon Kindles. You can edit content within a Flash file. Or even use it with XML based print products, like Adobe InDesign.
4. Redesigns, new sites. When you separate the content management from the website, you can manage content on separate sites hosted in different locations all from one Feed.Us account. Add a site for a specific event or a special campaign and utilize some of the content that's already on your current site. Redesigns with Feed.Us and CSS can be as easy as just changing the one CSS file.