What Business Catalyst Needs from Adobe

I wonder how far Adobe looked into Business Catalyst before deciding to bring it into the Adobe stable of products a few months ago?

Business Catalyst claims to be an “Online Business Building Tool” and, yes, it offers a wide variety of functions in a single online tool. But this very diversity is also its undoing. It is broad, but it is also shallow. And it is immature.

The shallowness is revealed to the web developer as soon as they start to use the system in earnest. It manifests in every aspect of the product. It is a system which does the basics in each functional area, but no more. It lacks the sophistication and polish of the specialised tool designed to do one job only and do it really well. By trying to do all jobs it does nothing particularly well.

The experienced designer and/or web developer will have used many different tools and systems in their career. Some tools are created so carefully and meticulously that it is a joy to use them. This cannot be said of Business Catalyst. It is tolerable experience and that is all one can say.

One only has to peruse the Business Catalyst support forums periodically to pick up the sentiment of frustration expressed by many users. There is a constant flow of messages from web developers wanting to do something which seems simple and sensible who are informed by the Business Catalyst support people that their expectation is not possible. The system cannot do this or that. Sometimes these limitations are almost crippling and the workarounds can be truly arcane.

Every time I pay a visit to these forums, I am struck by the palpable sense of anger coming through in some of the messages. People are not happy about a lot of things in Business Catalyst.

What can Adobe bring to this situation?

Hopefully wisdom and depth and thoroughness.

Do you read the 37signals blog articles about their design process? Perfectionists they are and it shows in their apps (Basecamp, Backpack, Highrise, etc). Business Catalyst needs developers and a development process of that calibre.

It’s a big ask because Business Catalyst is a jack of all trades and it needs to be a master of all those trades as well, instead of a master of none.

Here’s hoping for improvement.

Literature: Tags Not Granular Enough

I was planning to start this blog with an article about setting up a Business Catalyst shop. But that’s a long article and in the mean time Business Catalyst continues to frustrate with the enduring problem of arbitrary and unnecessary limitations.

Today’s example is the “Literature” feature.

Literature is intended for downloadable documents such as PDF files, MP3 files and so on. It offers tracking of download statistics as well as the ability to protect a file inside a “private” membership area, etc. In this way it differs from vanilla file uploads to the Business Catalyst (virtual) file system.

So far so good. However I soon discovered that adding a link to a web page to download a literature item lacks flexibility. When you insert a literature item in a page, it adds a {module …} placeholder to the page which is dynamically replaced by some generated HTML. What is this generated HTML?

It is controlled by a “Literature Layout” which is a template snippet that includes a series of tags and some HTML markup. Problem is that the tags available are very limited. This is the same problem I’ve encountered in the shop and elsewhere in Business Catalyst — the provided tags offer the absolute minimum of functionality. There’s no reason for this. With a tag lookup mechanism already present in the “page renderer”, adding extra tags would not be difficult.

What is needed in this specific case of “Literature” are more granular tags. For example, I want to associate my own graphic button with the link to the literature item. But the only tag I’m offered that generates (and knows about) the actual link to the literature item is the “name” tag (tag_name). This generates the name of the literature item and the link. All together and inseparable. Not useful. I need also a tag that just generates the href so I can compose my own link tag with custom image content.

I’m moving pages from an existing static website into Business Catalyst and already have pages with links to MP3 files which are nicely formatted with graphic buttons and so on. I had to give up on using the Business Catalyst “Literature” function because it just doesn’t fit the way I want to present the links to these “literature” items.

Let us hope that the Adobe acquisition will result in an influx of new design and programming talent so that these myriad limitations are addressed.