People are attracted to Elevated X for how good it is right out of the box with no customization. Every time we add something new they can have it instantly. We're updating the product constantly so if someone has a custom site, it means each time we put out something new that they want (up to several times per year) they'll be amidst some kind of coding project or will need to pay someone to work on their sites. This is shitty and it prevents businesses from staying up to date with what's current.

Obviously we do also realize a lot of people want to dig in and really customize their sites...

I could do like some other CMS companies and sell designs and customizations and make a ton of money but we won't. Elevated X's business model is different from companies who make a good part of their revenue from customizing the CMS system they sell. Our core focus is software and support, not custom coding. We do take on a few custom projects per week but we don't do big integration jobs, design work or large scale coding projects in house.

There are several coders who do Elevated X work. Demand is high and most are already booked up or design companies have them on contract. For example, Czarina is booked solid. Mark Tiarra does freelance Elevated X gigs but is busy with overflow work from design studios paying him to integrate designs for Elevated X customers. Wyldesites and Dickmans quote too high for most clients. Zuzana has no shortage of this kind of work so her rates go up. A few others will take small gigs but don't want to deal with cheapskates or throw out lowball quotes for major development jobs.

Instead of staffing to do this work and charge our customers for it we've undertaken a gigantic project that will likely go on through the end of 2013. We are redoing the Elevated X template system entirely from scratch with the goal of making it easy for even a basic user to make changes to their own sites. This will allow an Elevated X customer to hire any designer or coder, even if that person has zero prior experience with Elevated X.

Anyone who would like to give input on the new Elevated X template system is welcome. Please shoot me an email at [email protected] if you want to be a part of the process.

AJ

CMS like Wordpress and b2Evo can do the same as all those payscripts with long learning curve. Anyhow, as long as you don't want to cheat members into believing they are watching new content that in fact is recycled stuff, there is no need to have them imho.
Certainly, the systems are advanced and masterpieces of technology. Just saying a good quality paysite does not need tricks and gimmicks.

No I am not.
There is absolutely no need to offer videos in any other format than h264 mp4

From a technical perspective this is pretty accurate. When it comes to pay site owners and pay site members/customers the same logic doesn't apply.

I'll give you a real example.

We've had automatic video encoding functionality in the Elevated X CMS since 2008. That's 5 full years.

During that time, we saw things go from WMV/MPG/MOV/Flash being the formats people wanted to seeing Flash become the primary format and one of those others become the secondary, to seeing Flash/MP4 being the primary combination.

18 months ago we removed Flash from our product demo site and removed it as a default and went to just MP4. The result was a series of emails from prospective customers and existing customers asking if we supported Flash and other video formats. We realized they weren't ready for it so we then re-encoded all of our videos into better quality Flash files and added the format back into the system defaults.

We later realized if people saw the "Flash player" it didn't matter what video format it was actually playing. They were happy as long as they believed it was playing Flash even though it was playing MP4.

Elevated X is progressive when it comes to tech trends. Our CMS supports a multitude of devices with no customization needed including tablets and mobile phones. We've had detection for HTML5 capable devices and automated delivery of automatically encoded MP4 video in multiple sizes based on devide since 2010.

After all of that, people still want Flash and other formats.

If and when MP4 does become the only file people want to offer, automated video encoding will still be critital because not just 1 file, 1 size or 1 watermark is needed to deliver optimal results to all customers on all devices and platforms. This isn't going to change anytime soon. :2 cents:

Look at how long it took Real Media and Quicktime to drop off the list of what people felt were "required" video formats. Believe it or not we still come across pay site owners with Real Video files on their sites.

I like this thread

Mansion Productions keeps full time designers and full time webmasters whose primary job is to do complete turnkey integrations - from new designs, to redesigns of existing sites running on MAS or another CMS, to full import and setup of all the data from whatever system or even from static HTML hand-made and manually updated sites (yes, even though it's 2013 there are still clients with such sites out there).

I do not quite agree, and for sure it is not true for everyone who just needs specific features. It depends on how different those features are from what a CMS can offer out of the box, and how much money one is willing to spend. Most of the times the requests for so called "customizations" end up with a small piece of additional php code directly in the templates, with zero customization of core program scripts. And if it takes less than a couple of hours to do it, we don't even charge the clients, just do it for them.

And even if the requested features are serious and need coding, it still comes out less expensive to have the CMS vendor add these custom features charging only for them, than to hire someone and pay him for reinventing the wheel - then spend all the time needed to bugfix and troubleshoot basic features that have been a standard in a good tailored adult CMS, tested and perfected for years.

Not necessarily. For the last 3-4 years we are taking only customization request that can be implemented in one of the following ways:

(a) template tweaks or small piece of external code (php and/or javascript) which is either put directly in the templates or included from external files on the client side, so that updates made to the CMS do not break or affect the functioning of these custom add-ons

(b) a new set of tags within the MAS proprietary templating system which can be used on client's demand and do not interfere with the remaining tags

(c) modifications in the core system scripts that either extend the existing functionalities (and are optional to use), or in the rare cases when they conflict with an already established functionality they can be turned on or off through a global configuration switch - so that the new code works well in both cases, does not affect other customers and there is no need to re-do or troubleshoot it when new versions get delivered.

I partially agree with AJ that customizations and new feature development are two different business models and it is easier to move forward if a company focus on just one of them. In the past we had taken on many severe customizations for clients which turned their versions into separate branches that could hardly be updated along with the main one. We have quickly realized that this is not a good practice and chose to go in the middle. Bit by bit we've reintegrated most of the standalone customizations into the standard MAS version, this way making them available to anyone with just a few configuration settings. And now we're doing only customizations that do not require sepaarte versions of the system scripts, as I mentioned above.

Respectively, for features demanded by clients who go into the main version and are really good and useful for others, we are quoting less than 50% of the actual cost of the job, or many times even do it for free if the client is not in position to want it immediately. This business model is helping the system grow with the needs of its customers.

As for the template system - we had realized from the very beginning, before even MAS 1.0 was put live back in 2002, that neither Smarty nor XML are good enough or easy enough for basic users to deal with. So we've developed our own template system which has proven to work well there has never been a need to redo it completely - just to add new tags and control structures to it. And it is now offering both the basic tags, which can be edited by anyone directly in Dreamweaver, in design view, as well as more advanced tags and structures, for the more demanding users who still don't need to be programmers but only have basic HTML code editing skills.


-- Ross

:2 cents: You hit the nail on the head.

"Flash" has become synonymous with streaming like "Xerox" is synonymous with making copies of paper. Most members really don't know the difference between the formats other than some work for them and some do not. As long as they think they are seeing a "Flash" video, or whatever they think it is, they are happy.

We say yes whenever we are asked if we have Flash videos because we know it means they are asking if we have streaming or not.

Agreed.

:thumbsup

Would love to see TMM in the thread with updates on Carma

yes, agreed!

:thumbsup

50...,.,.,., :)

Business bump.

Trust me, all her "extra profit" is blown on 4Head after doing the design.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoSZ3D6U0nU



:1orglaugh

Which one of you guys want to pay me to use your CMS? and set it all up for me..

thanks