h0bbel.p0ggel.org

TypeRoom Lite is an online editing and publishing tool for your own website, intended to make it very easy for end users to update and edit their own content.  As a member of Habari and with my general interest in web publishing solutions this did sound very interesting, and I signed up for the Private Beta. The service itself is going live in a couple of days, but I've been fortunate enough to be able to test drive it before everyone else. A introductory video has also been posted on YouTube:

The way it works is that you logon the TypeRoom site and then type in
the URL of the page you want to edit. TypeRoom Lite then downloads the
pure HTML code of the page you are editing and lets you edit it. You
can then edit the text, insert images etc. without actually making any
changes to the original site. You can then proceed to publish your changes by using one of three different methods.

1. 1. The first option is a FTP based solution where your edited content gets uploaded to the TypeRoom servers where it gets stored, the original page is downloaded for backup purposes and your changes published on the original site.
   I was unable to test this feature, as the account I was given didn't have access to use this option. My suspicion is that you will have to provide the FTP logon information to your own site as well, for TypeRoom to be able to publish it for you.
   I don't know about everyone else, but I generally don't trust my logon information to third parties.
   
2. 2. The second option is to email your changes to an email address of your choice. The email consists of a link to the edits the user has made and the same publishing opions are presented again
3. 3. The third option is to download the changes. This lets you download a .zip file of the edits that has been made. The zip file contains a html file you then have to transfer to your own website manually.
   

I'm sorry TypeRoom, but I think you have missed your mark with this one. With the influx of web content management systems, I don't think that many users are still hand editing their updates nor doing static file based web pages. If so, they should be looking at the various content management solutions that are available to them, rather than to use TypeRoom Lite as a web based editor for static files. As impressive as the TypeRoom Lite interface might be, it's not much more than a web based editor (In fact the editor it uses is WYMeditor). I also find it peculiar that the TypeRoom Blog is powered by Wordpress, a system TypeRoom light can't really be used in conjuction with due to it's dynamic database driven nature.

The people behind TypeRoom are also working on a TypeRoom Pro version, which might very well be a great product. Sadly I don't know enough about what it is supposed to do, so I can't comment on that yet.

As far as I'm concerned, TypeRoom doesn't provide much more than a glorified web based HTML editor and don't offer much in terms of ingenuity nor innovatation. In fact I am pretty disappointed with what it offers, based on the pre-beta impressions I had from reading on their site.