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Show HN: JSON CMS

37 pointssashthebash25 comments

Hey all,

some time ago I already presented my idea on HN with a landing page. Your feedback has been great and very valuable, we continued iterating on the product with customers and now have our first public version online.

StorageRoom is a cloud-based CMS built specifically for Mobile Apps. If you have your own mobile app or if you are an agency or freelancer developing apps for others you can use it to create apps faster and to combine the advantages of native mobile applications with the ease of maintenance of websites.

http://storageroomapp.com

What do you think? Do you see other use cases for this?

Any feedback about the service and the idea is highly appreciated... thanks!

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I see two potential target groups here. One focuses on the developer and tries to solve the data storage and synchronization procedure. In that field, I'm not sure what the benefits of your solution are. Could you elaborate on how it is different to CouchDB[1] or even Amazon's storage service[2]?

The other market I'm seing targets users of the CMS system, i.e. the people who actually maintain the data. In most data centric projects I've been working on, you could be sure that the client will at some stage ask, how (not whether) he can change the existing data and add datasets after development has finished. This usually involved creating a CRUD user interface, which was tedious and in almost all cases, was never used.

Your front page focuses a lot on the former target group (create general datastructures, update and query them) whereas I think you might be offering more value in the latter group ("see how simple it is to add another recipe into your cooking app"). If you could combine the client's desire to control his money and time investment while making the solution easy to integrate for the developer, that might be good enough.

[1] CouchDB for iOS devices - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2310863

[2] Amazon S3 for iOS: http://aws.amazon.com/sdkforios/faqs/

[3] Earlier discussion on StorageRoom: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1847115

Our solution helps developers to quickly integrate managed content into their mobile applications. The managed content is created and edited by editors in our CMS, and the developers can then query the CMS with our RESTful JSON API.

CouchDB is useful for storing content like high scores into a central database from your mobile app, but you cannot use it to easily provide a nice interface for editors to manage news stories or points of interests (maybe you have a google map in your app that shows store locations). This is what we focus on, a flexible CMS for mobile apps with a nice interface for editors and not only a nice API for developers.

S3 on the other hand is useful to store files. You can also upload static JSON or XML files there, but how do your editors manage those? They cannot edit them manually and static files don't provide search capabilities from the app (e.g. only give me store locations around the user's current location).

One benefit that I see is that this could allow normal business/end users to more easily update content directly, rather than having to get a developer involved.

Obviously, you could easily create your own interface for users to do things like this, but why reinvent the wheel when it is already well designed and available at a decent price?

This is a nice idea.

We build a lot of mobile apps, and we use a combination of the Django admin, and django-tastypie. This gets a JSON API up and running with authentication in very short order, but a product in this space would be very welcome, especially as it allows the data model to be built with a GUI. Our programmers spend a lot of time on model development and being able to delegate that to less technical staff would be a big benefit.

White-label would obviously be a very strong requirement.

This is what we used to do with Rails. But the backends were never a priority and ended up being hackish and hard to use for editors, so in the end the devs were editing the content... urg.

Hosting and maintaining those backends hasn't been fun either, in our opinion mobile devs are better off using our service. They get a better solution faster.

"But the backends were never a priority and ended up being hackish and hard to use for editors"

This is our main problem, too. I don't have any data from our clients, but I have a feeling that being able to provide a clean, user-friendly, branded back-end would increase participation in content creation quite considerably.

I think this will be useful for a lot of developers of iPhone/Adroid apps. Many don't have the know how (or time) to develop, run and maintain backend systems and it pushes the development cost way way up for clients and complicates our own applications.

We just integrated a purpose built CMS with a bunch of iPhone apps for a client and it was not a lot of fun so I'll give your product a try for sure.

As for feedback - the one thing with the UI is that having three different types of save buttons is a bit confusing at first but I'm not sure if there is a more efficient way to do it. Also, a big win would be if you added an etag along with the JSON with the location of the images to download. I do like very much that collections can be attached to multiple applications.

If your are ever in the Bay Area come by our weekly iPhone Meetup Monday nights in SF. (search iPhone in sf on meetup.com - our logo bleeds six colors...) or shoot me an email (profile)

Thanks for your feedback!

The iPhone Meetup is on the list for the next Bay area visit.

No Problem, I'll mention your stuff at the next meetup and let you know if I get a project done with your service. I have something in mind.

I'm a little confused about why this is targeted specifically to mobile. I've been looking for a back-end only CMS for years now. Originally, I didn't mind just having my front-end share a database with my CMS, but it would be even better if it used a RESTful API like you've got here.

Maybe I'm missing something? The closest thing I've found to what I'm looking for is: http://www.pureedit.com/ and storageroomapp.com seems very similar (although much better) judging by the Introduction Video.

We currently focus our marketing efforts on mobile apps, as this is the most obvious use case for us currently.

But actually you can of course use the CMS from wherever you want to. We already have some websites that pull content via the RESTful API. You can even use JSON-P to load content in the browser dynamically from Javascript across domains (think of widgets).

I can also imagine that our system is useful for desktop apps or games.

Please give it a try and report back if it fulfills your requirements.

I definitely dig on the core concept of making it easier to get content to mobile devices. However, having done this exact type of work for an agency in the past, more often than not content was shared between web and mobile platforms. Do you have a plan to support importing content from popular CMSes or some other way of sharing data between CMSes?

We are looking into an import function. Currently you can use the Ruby Gem to import data with a small script. This is not perfect but should help in the meantime.

You can also directly use the RESTful API from your server, query content and serve websites in HTML.

Seems to be a good idea. You'll have to market this a lot to agencies building mobile apps (I would think). Easy tutorial etc.

This is our plan. We are also already looking into creating a white label solution for agencies (cms.myagency.com), so that they can resell it to their customers without our branding.

I love this idea. Fantastic job. I'm going to give it a shot myself for an app I'm prototyping.

Thanks. We would love to get some feedback from you on how it is going.

Clickable: http://storageroomapp.com

The tour page is not usable on an iPhone. Love the concept but since you're targeting mobile it would be good to present your site well on mobile.

http://storageroomapp.com/tour

I like the idea, but I want have a lot more than 20GB available. I think it would be more inclined to buy this as traditional software (instead of SaaS).

What kind of content do you have that is this large? Please send me an email at sascha at thriventures dot com and we can talk about your custom requirements.

I feel it can be very useful. How does it differentiate with MongoDB, CouchDB etc?

We use MongoDB in the backend ourselves. But neither MongoDB nor CouchDB provide a nice interface for editors.

You cannot ask non-technical content editors to edit JSON manually and they don't want to edit content in a technical phpMyAdmin-like interface (believe me, we tried!).

We provide an easy way for an administrator/developer to set up collections for different content types. They can choose between many different basic (strings, integers, ...) and advanced (attachment, image, location) fields and configure how editors can enter the content into the fields (including validations, so that an URL field really contains a valid URL).

Developers can then query the content from their mobile applications on different platforms. In the future we will also provide open-source libraries for iOS/Android to make the integration even easier.

Got it. Thank you for the explanation.

I think the difference is that your clients/end-users don't know how to create/update documents in a database. This makes it easy for them to manage a database of which the developer will query.

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