It is one thing to create E-Commerce applications based on relevant data. You transform information, import the result into one or many backends and enable business success by using a modern frontend. But structured data is only one part of the story. It takes engaging content, relevant stories and sometimes pure storytelling to reach out to the customer. 

There are a couple of editorial tools that help you to create your content. Coming from a developer background the question is: What tools do you need to learn or implement that are easy to learn, do not clutter your code and will are able to grow with your application. Also ,since your client is going to create its own content, these tools should be as foolproof as possible.

So we've reviewed different CMS solutions, Drag&Drop editors, etc. just to conclude that you either need to become too specialized, loose flexibility or have a rather steep learning curve. In the end we decided to stay as flexible as possible, stick to the stuff we know already, but also enhance the experience for our clients that still need a good writing experience. This is the part where Ebbie comes into play. We use CSS,JS,HTML and build Blocks and webcomponents that we, and our clients, can arrange in a layout using the Blockly tool. On top of that we mark some parts of this content to be editable by the user with some very simple but easy to understand and focused inline editing tools. 

From its early concepts to its current implementation Ebbie has already come a long way. Its already used in some current projects and will it will enhance a lot more in the coming months. We know that there are some quirks that need to be removed and some other parts need to need some cleanup and love. We know what we are talking about since we use Ebbie ourself. But we know how to tackles these tasks and turn Ebbie into one of the best developer and customer friendly tool for content editing out there. So stay tuned to find out more about Ebbie the Blockly Html Editor. 

 

A few final words: Because of the great Blockly community Ebbie was made possible. Some Blockly sample projects gave us a good starting point and the always responsive forum members are of great help. Also thanks to startbootstrap.com for providing the business template that we use here to showcase Ebbie.