7 Features It Would Be Nice If MojoMotor Had

In the past few weeks, there has been a lot of talk about ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter - two Ellislab products. Although starting a fire like those probably isn’t possible with MojoMotor - still a young product - we went ahead and titled this post to be as non-confrontational possible. Now, let’s get on with it.

MojoMotor, for those who don’t know, is a niftily little edit-in-place CMS from Ellislab. It was released 6 months ago, and since then has gone from 1.0 to 1.0.7 with some bug fixes and enhancements here and there.

But what about the future? Is MojoMotor fine the way it is, or does it need to innovate? Here’s our take.

Let’s think about MojoMotor’s main customer base. I’d venture to say that they are, like, ExpressionEngine’s customer base, smaller design companies. However, the emphasis is on design. They are companies that make small sites for smaller clients with limited functionality. These companies maybe didn’t start with web stuff - they maybe started with print design and moved into web. The sites MM should power are frequently described as “brochure sites”, and the companies that make these types of sites are the ones that should be the perfect fit for MojoMotor.

In short, they aren’t developers and developing isn’t high on their priority list. They need a CMS that is simple for clients and also simple to implement simple functionality. The simple part is key.

Introducing MojoBlocks

We here at Green Egg Media love MojoMotor. It has an interface that clients just click with, and when a complicated back end isn’t something you need, MojoMotor provides a paradigm shift into something more comfortable.

As great as MojoMotor is, it can be frustrating that its signature in-page editing feature only works for blocks of text. If you need your client to be able to update an H1 header, for instance, you are out of luck if you want to keep clients out of the layouts.

Today, we’re proud to be releasing Green Egg Media’s first foray into the paid addon community with MojoBlocks - a widget-like addon for MojoMotor that allows you to create and control editable blocks of different content - Twitter streams, RSS feeds, H tags, and more. It comes with 13 blocks and supports third party ones as well. Check out a full list of blocks here.

We’ve worked hard on making it something that is an essential to any MojoMotor install. You can find it at http://www.greeneggmedia.com/mojoblocks. It’s $15, and available for purchase today.

MojoMotor in Motion

The day before EECI2010, Lance asked me if I had any predictions what would happen at the conference. I had been thinking about this, so I said I thought Ellislab was going to announce a smaller and cheaper version of ExpressionEngine. Lance told me I was stupid and made me sleep outside with the Safeway gangs across the street from his apartment.

So I was naturally very excited the next day when Mr. Allard announced MojoMotor in a flurry of techno music and applause. Plus, I had totally called it! That’s right. I did, Lance. Deal with it.

I love EE, but for smaller projects I will use Wordpress, because EE would be overkill. In theory, that makes me target market #1 for MojoMotor, so I was eager to try it out and kick the tires. After some quality time with MojoMotor and me with some wine by the fire, here are some thoughts.