2 years in the making... today marks the day of the official public launch of DropInBlog! We're pretty excited with all the features that made the cut at launch, and really excited to get it out in the wild and see what everyone is going to do with it.
What exactly are we doing here?
Well, for many years our agency clients had been asking for a blog solution. Something that will fit into existing sites. Surprisingly, there was really not a good option out there. So we decided to make one. It's been a pretty awesome journey.
The idea is simple. We wanted to make a cloud based solution that would be easy for designers and developers to integrate into existing websites without having to deal with skinning a 3rd party solution or maintaining a separate system.
DropInBlog solves this problem by outputting html directly into existing websites and frameworks. This is done through a simple Javascript integration that outputs posts in nicely formatted html (with CSS classes on everything for any additional styling you want to add). Alternatively, you can integrate with us using the JSON API which just outputs all the post data in a nice structured data format you can do whatever you want with.
Pretty cool stuff.
Why shouldn't you just use Wordpress/Tumblr/Blogger?
- You don't want to spend hours/days/weeks creating a custom theme that matches your current site.
- You don't want to worry about plugin updates, constant security breaches, and software updates.
- You want to quickly integrate a blog that matches your current site out of the box.
- You want to have the option to access a JSON API that you can easily bend to your will.
- You want your writers to have a dead-simple blogging interface.
- You want to have a truly integrated solution so you don't have to maintain two platforms.
What features are we rolling out with at Launch?
For Bloggers:
- Manage Posts.
- Manage Categories.
- Attach "Featured Image" to posts for display on blog home / category pages and post detail.
- Simple yet robust WYSIWYG with text formatting, image/video management, etc.
- Disqus and Facebook comment systems.
- Social Sharing buttons.
For Developers / Designers:
- Super fast integration with our Javascript copy and paste option.
- Inherits your CSS and all elements have unique CSS classes for finer tuning of look and feel.
- A number of flexible widgets including recent post list, category list, etc.
- Option to use JSON API for advanced ultra-flexible integration.
- Example code for JSON integrations.
- Detailed documentation of JSON parameters.
- Either integration option is quick to implement and gives you only the content you need.
What's Next?
We invite you to set up an account and take advantage of the trial to take a look around:
Also, if you want to keep up-to-date on what's next follow us on twitter @DropInBlog
