Typemill

Did you know that product manuals play a crucial role in user experience? While some diligently read through them before diving into a new device, many only turn to manuals when they encounter difficulties. However, traditional paper manuals often get misplaced, leaving users stranded.

In the realm of technical documentation and manufacturing, digital manuals have emerged as a pivotal topic. As new legislations and regulations come into effect, the landscape is evolving rapidly. According to Instrktiv, a leading platform for technical writers, the latest update to the Guide to the Application of the Machinery Directive heralds a significant development: the acceptance of digital user instructions. However, there are stipulations. Manufacturers must ensure that digital instructions are downloadable and printable, enabling users to access them conveniently on any electronic device at any time.

This is where Typemill steps in, especially for small manufacturers. With Typemill, creating digital manuals becomes seamless. Notably, the Ebook plugin enhances Typemill's capabilities, enabling companies to effortlessly generate printable PDFs. Say goodbye to costly print production lines and hello to a flexible and eco-friendly solution.

One client send me his content to fix an error and I got website with more than 4.000 pages. That is quite a lot. The frontend website was still very fast, but the backend website was a bit slow. Publishing, unpublishing or deleting pages took more than one second. I was a bit shocked, because it was not the cms that I loved for its simplicity and performance anymore.

The reason behind this: Typemill uses a hierarchical navigation with all pages that is always visible and accessible. If you change one page, then you have to regenerate and cache the whole navigation, similar to a static website generator.

The solution worked quite well: I seperated the navigation for each content folder, so you only have to recreate the static navigation of the folder. This improved the speed for actions like publishing or unpublishing from 1 second to about 0.1 or 0.2 second.

There is much room for more performance improvements, but at the end Typemill is simply not build for large scale websites. I created Typemill for documentations and similar web-projects, so I think you can use Typemill now for websites between 5.000 and 10.000 pages.

Read more about the release here: https://typemill.net/news/typemill-2-4-0-seo-performance-and-cyanine

Version 1 of Typemill had a hidden public demo on a different domain. I got some hundred registrations in about 2 years without any marketing, so public demos are very very popular for ondemand software.

For version 2 of Typemill I decided to create an official public demo without registration, and this demo went online yesterday: https://try.typemill.net There is a reset every 30 minutes and it randomly installs a dark or white version of the theme. I want to add more feedback options for demo-users so I get more insights from users to improve Typemill in future. Not sure if you have any recommendations to engage demo users and get insights?

Open source projects are cool, but in many cases they will ruin the founder. I really love Typemill, I have so many ideas for it, and I really want to spend more time on it in future. The only way to do this is to create a sustainable business model. After month of work, I introduced a license system for plugins, themes, and services. Hopefully, this will become a turning point for Typemill in future.

I think the model is super fair: Typemill is still open source (MIT) and free for use. For advanced plugins, you can buy a MAKER license or a BUSINESS-license. Both licenses are subscriptions: With a MAKER license you can use all MAKER products for one Typemill website and one year. With a BUSINESS license you can use all MAKER and BUSINESS products for one Typemill website and one year: https://typemill.net/license/buy

There are three MAKER plugins out now, and I will add new MAKER and BUSINESS plugins every month. Let me know what you think about this business-model, I think it is pretty unique in the space of Content Management Systems.

The new standard theme is made with Tachyons Utility CSS and combines nearly all features that Typemill provides: Flexible navigation, a super flexible and optional landingpage with 5 sortable elements, customizable brand-colors, individual fonts for headlines, text and links/navis and a lot of other features that the old standard-theme provided. The design is modern, the code is lightweight: https://typemill.net

Version 1.3.3 introduces a brand new media-library for files and images. Together with a new image upload field it has never been easier to publish images and files on your website. With the image component you can upload images to content and to meta-tabs. One hero-image is not enough? No problem: With 4 lines of YAML you can add your own image to any meta-tab you want.

The primary purpose of Typemill are documentations and structured websites. You can very easily create hierarchical page-structures with drag & drop. However, sometimes you want to create some news or some blog-posts ordered by the publish date. Version 1.3.3 introduces folders with posts instead of pages. And with just one click you can convert a folder of pages into a folder of posts and the other way around again.

Happy New Year and Typemill 1.3.0 is out!!! Starting with this version, you can add any kind of meta-data to a page. Some standard metas are title, description, publication-date, author and a hero-image. But you can define your own meta-fields or even your own meta-tabs. And it does not stop here: A meta-tab is simply a vue-component, so instead of just adding some meta-input-fields to a tab, you can also add a complete vue-application here. There is already a fancy crosspost-plugin that manages crossposts to dev.to with a vue-application.