CityDesk Initial Impressions

By Rik Heywood
5 December, 2001

At the moment I am trying out a new web site management tool called CityDesk from Fog Creek Software. It provides a dead simple way of building up your site so you can concentrate of writing articles, without getting distracted by fiddling with the site design all the time. It actually works in a very similar way to the home grown tools I had been using before (though CityDesk has a nice UI and makes it a lot simpler).

My home grown solution was called WebBuilder and is used to create the Synaptic Soup company web site and the Cipher game engine support web site. WebBuilder basically works by letting you define a template HTML file for each folder in your site. The template contains all the formatting, and boiler plate HTML that sets up the look and feel for the site. Each of the other html files in that folder is then merged with this template to produce the final result, which can be uploaded directly. WebBuilder also contains a number of custom features that are used to generate a lot of the API documentation for Cipher from far simpler scripts, which reduces the amount of work needed to document each function, and also ensures that all functions are documented with a consistent style.

CityDesk also lets you write template HTML files that can contain simple scripts. The scripts can be used to easily build up tables of contents and links to articles. The bulk of your time with CityDesk is spent just writing articles though. It has a WYSIWYG editor, with a spell checker that makes it pretty painless to get typing.

When you are done, a single click on the Publish icon will regenerate the site and upload everything that has changed. Excellent. At the moment I am using the trial version, so I will give it a couple of weeks to see how well it performs. [Update: I have coughed up the cash and brought a copy now]

First Impressions

So far I have come away thinking it is a pretty good tool. Will it be the tool to use for building the company intranet with? The main features in its favor for me are...

• WYSIWYG Editor.
• Quick and easy to publish site
• Really easy to set up the look of the site. I was able to get this entire web site transferred into CityDesk in a couple of hours. It basically looks identical to the previous version of the site. Only the filenames have changed.

There are a couple of things that are bugging me though.

• Once you insert an image into an article, it does not seem possible to edit its properties again.
• The spell checker isn't great and does not come with a British English dictionary. Check as you type would be a great new feature for me.
• Stores the entire site in a single file. This is good most of the time, but if that file gets corrupted, it is pretty serious and I loose everything since the last backup.
• No undo in the editor. There is a menu option that says Undo but is does not appear to do anything. [Update: Today the undo feature appears to be working fine. I have no idea what went wrong yesterday. I think it will undo changes if they are applied with the keyboard, but not the toolbar.]