Introduction

We needed a publishing system that can manage a huge number of pages. It allows for anyone to easily contribute, just like Wikipedia. It needed to be fast to administer and fast to develop content.

Content needed to be presented consistently with a UI that works with all features enabled on all screen sizes including phones. It needed to suit the spirit of developers and be fun to use for writers, developers and readers alike.

We tried Joomla and Google Docs but found that this fell short of our requirements. We could not find such a system ready made. Instead we found many powerful open source building blocks that already did what we needed. V²Publishing is the open source glue to combine these wonderful building blocks into a homogeneous publishing system.

Although the V² core team itself is small, the above approach puts hundreds of developers behind all components of V²Publishing. This way constant development and improvements are guaranteed.

Key Features

Speed

We are a small team. Speed allows us to get more things done. V²Flow.Publishing is built for speed, whether you are looking at learning curve or the time required for workflows of writing, publishing, and contribution.

Joy

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Writing and publishing is creative work. When you enjoy it your work automatically moves smoother and the quality and creativity simply goes up. We needed writing and publishing workflows and tools that get out of the way. So the writer can get into the zone and stay there without being distracted by non-intuitive tools and workflows.

Clarity

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Lack of clarity was our single biggest impediment to speed. When we set out to build a new publishing system from scratch we made it a point for the workflows to be simple and clear. For the documentation to be a model of clarity. In the end you will see that the clarity of your own writing will improve, too!

Contribution Friendly

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We believe in community development. We equipped V²Flow.Publishing with a very easy contribution system. For the visitor it is fast and straight forward to make changes. For the staff it is very efficient to incorporate them.

Open and Free

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Our organization is part of the Open Source Movement. Consequently we want to use best of breed, bleeding edge technologies, apps and services. We found they normally work great. And if they don’t, we can work with their active and responsive communities to fix the problems. We are on GitHub and we comprised V².Flow.Publishing of tools, apps and services that are on GitHub too.

Secure

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Because we work with a very large team of contributors including perfect strangers, we required a system with automatic and strong backups and a revision management that allowed easy roll back to previous versions, including tracking of who made what change when. Finally, we wanted to be able to easily set up mirror servers, just in case, as well as to check the functionality of successful backups.

Technical Benefits

For those for whom the above chapters were too much prose – here come the hardcore benefits:

1. Very efficient workflows for: Writing, Publishing, Contribution. Making us 3x faster.
2. Great documentation: Detailed references and tutorials with templates for fast and easy training.
3. High quality Responsive Design † automatically adapting to every screen size.
4. Enabling our team to produce the best looking know how articles with best flow and clearest structure.
5. We have full control of design and styling.
6. Low cost. Ideally, hosting, templates and plugins are all free.
7. We do not lose time solving conflicts after updating plugins and extensions (Joomla)
8. If possible, all ingredients are free and open-source software (FOSS)

† Responsive design means that the page layout and content automatically adjust to the screen size of the device you are using. We require that for mobile support all features remain intact. Reader keeps overview despite the small screen. UI is fast, despite the reduced performance of mobile devices. And for big screens the responsive design puts the added real estate to good use.

Comparison

About the Comparison

We loved Google Docs and Joomla when we used them. For their intended design target they both work great. By no means do we want to say with the below comparison that V²Publishing is superior to Google Docs and/or Joomla from the perspective of a generic user. The opposite is the case: For general use they will both be vastly superior to V²Publishing.

But we are not a general user. We are developers, business owners and members of non profit organizations and we are looking for very specific requirements to reduce our workload and increase our productivity in collaborative writing. The below comparison is for those specific features we cared about:

Reader Experience

Author Experience

Administration

Design & Development

Who is V² Publishing for?

Software Developer on GitHub

Present your product with product pages. Full GitHub integration including GitHub Issues and GitHub Flow. Very intuitive user interface. All authoring is done in markdown, just like the wiki and issues in GitHub. This means you can develop content in the wiki and issues and then move the same markdown source code to your website. Even maintenance and contribution to your pages is done in markdown.

V²Publishing has a small server footprint, is easy to backup and is very safe. It is virtually impossible for your website to catch a virus. It looks and feels like a Content Management System, but technically it is just static web pages.

Non Profit Organizations

All software is FOSS (Free and Open Source). The server footprint is so small that many high quality zero cost hosting options are available. The navigation system can handle content ranging from a few pages to thousands. Contribution work can be tracked with the integrated workflow management. Anybody can contribute, just like Wikipedia, yet you have full control over accepting contribution.

V²Publishing has a small server footprint, is easy to backup and is very safe. It is virtually impossible for your website to catch a virus. It looks and feels like a Content Management System, but technically it is just static web pages.

Small Business

V²Publishing works both for your intranet and company web site. This reduces your learning curve. You have many choices of hosting services from free GitHub pages if you work on open source projects to regular $1/ month hosting service providers.

V²Publishing has a small server footprint, is easy to backup and is very safe. It is virtually impossible for your website to catch a virus. It looks and feels like a Content Management System, but technically it is just static web pages.

V² Publishing Building Blocks

The Complete Article Series

Our article series on modern writing and publishing. If you are a person, team or organization who wishes to increase your quality of writing, styling and structure of articles, and at the same time dramatically increase the speed of getting the work done, then this article series is for you.

If you are managing a team of writers and publishers in a workplace without documented style guides and workflows, this article series could be your nirvana.

Grand Conclusion

Writing and publishing has become ever easier and lower cost. V²Publishing is another push forward to increase speed of authoring and publication.

It may be unique with its approach to make contributions to your website easy and available to anyone, just like to Wikipedia.

V²Flow.Publishing starts with a clean slate. It provides updated style guides and workflows which match the requirements of the new era. It comes with complete and consistent documentation to ease the learning curve and reduce the workload of the senior staff when training junior staff.

By switching from HTML-centric workflow to kramdown, the writer, editor, and contributor enjoy the increased legibility and simplicity of edits as well as staying in the zone of writing.

Last but not least, article templates, workflow templates, and preflight checks speed up work and help to keep quality on a consistent high level.