Downloaded the CityDesk Starter Edition. Pros Simple installation. For folks who want to start using it out-of-the-box, it’s ready to rock. A decent amount of customizability. Extensibility with other web…
For folks who want to start using it out-of-the-box, it’s ready to rock.
A decent amount of customizability.
Extensibility with other web features, and highly templated.
The basic advantages of being able to compose off-line.
All those abilities mentioned to do multiple versions, easily change lay-out, and easily handle basic newsletter publishing? Yup.
Cons
No apparent archiving feature. Nobody has complained about this yet, but nobody’s sample pages have gone beyond a month yet, either.
No article numbering scheme to allow automatic templated links back to archives (see above).
The system is designed around a “headline page”/”article pages” model, which is in keeping with its purpose as a newsletter publishing package. While there are examples given of folks using it as a blogging tool, there are normal bits of that which are missing (most of what I’ve listed here in cons).
Inconsistent allowance of HTML codes. For example, there’s no way to italicize part of a headline.
The starter package is limited to 50 “pages.” Digging into things a bit, it sounds like a “page” constitutes an article. An article could be a single item (as in this article on CityDesk), or it could be an entire day (what they recommend — but that then loses a lot of the fun automated features of CityDesk). In either case, the “free” version of this package is very limited.
There are ways to get around some of the above problems, no doubt. But they all will require a lot of customization — which you aren’t really supposed to need to do with this package, though they give you the tools to do it.
Result? While I might recommend it for our church, to keep the weekly bulletins and the online versions of same in sync, I can’t recommend it to bloggers. Yet. Wait for some people to tackle the above problems. Give it six months, and then check back again.