Drupal Design & Development
WebEnabled Instant Dev Platform - It Rocks!
Submitted by Dream on Mon, 26/04/2010
A huge part of every designer and developers work schedule involves managing a current live install of the platform they are working with, this not only serves as a testing ground for development of their active projects but also allows them to experiment with features and areas that may not be a core service area for them.
At Dreamleaf, we use both the Drupal and Wordpress platforms to create our magic, which means we have a core of 2 platforms to maintain before even touching a clients website. Then we bring in an essential factor, the on-going development of the platforms, both Drupal and Wordpress have brand spanking new versions of their offerings coming out in 2010. Each with new features and in some ways radical changes in their inner workings that are needed to be tested, learnt and mastered.
So, it was entirely by chance when I stumbled across a new service called WebEnabled, a self-titled "instant development platform" for developers and designers. I can't praise the service highly enough, even though I've been using their service for about a month - I've already seen a huge increase in my productivity due to the ease of use their system provides.
WebEnabled allows virtually instant install of a raft of open source php products, Drupal and Wordpress (of course) and also other well known systems such as Silverstripe (which started life as a Google Summer of Code project), Joomla and Magento. It may seem a trivial point, but having a simple and pain free installation procedure really does allow more time to go into the all important work for clients.
The service takes this further though, providing options such as root level access, custom domain name support and even built in subversion repositories to keep track of your versions. Another really great feature is being able to add team members to particular projects, especially handy for designers like Dreamleaf that often work in remote team environments.
There are loads of other features, but I'll conclude with what I deem the single most useful!
The WebEnabled service allows deployment to external servers, which means that from initial setup through to completion of a project, time and labour is saved, cutting the costs for both Dreamleaf and our clients.
Now, it's rare you'll see Dreamleaf give such biased reviews of a service, but you can rest assured the only motive behind this post is to highlight a service which is so good that I want to be one of the first to shout about it's merits. I do hope that if you read this and are a designer or developer that you will support WebEnabled. It's in it's early days and I firmly believe that when we see something that provides such a great offering, we should support, shout and grow that business.
