So I spent a while on their page, https://www.hlx.live/business/project-plan seems to have the best explanation how Adobe thinks you should use their product. However I still don't really see the use case:
> Helix dynamically renders HTML via Markdown that is generated from the content source documents. Markdown provides an abstraction as well as filter for content created in the various different data sources and strips all the formatting that cannot easily be projected into HTML semantics. This means you don’t have to worry about authors picking the wrong font, size, or color, Helix will take care that your final site looks as the design specs say.
So it's just generating a markdown document from my Word document and dynamically renders that to HTML. It seems like a weird SSG that isn't static, relies on proprietary files stored in either Google Drive or SharePoint, and seems to be aimed at Content Creators that are not tech savy at all (why else would you prefer Word over md files?).
However all that is still very confusing and it looks a bit like the project changed direction during development (e.g. there's still mention of GitHub as file storage which has been discontinued in the faqs etc.) I still don't see who would use this for their site.
The hard part in maintaining a website by a team of non-geeks is not a Markdown renderer, but the fact that people have their own preferred tools and workflows, and aren't keen on learning yet another one. All the extra export/import/sync steps are a pain for them, and cause chaos when collaborating. You update the Markdown version, someone else changes the Word version instead, a third person hates Word, and someone else puts notes on GitHub, and now you need to train half a dozen people how to clone a repo and how to fix a detached head.
> So it's just generating a markdown document from my Word document and dynamically renders that to HTML.
Ages ago (probably more than 15 years or so) I generated HTML, even multi-page web sites from within Word itself, using VBA. It required some proficiency in VBA but Word already had a structure that you could translate with different classes of headings, font modifications, etc. - so it wasn't exactly "rocket science" either. I did the same in Excel, but here more focused on autogenerating pseudo "db-driven" sites than on prose.
Typically these would be "intranet" apps, but I believe some may have been exposed to the www. Being static sites, security was like any other pure HTML site.
> I still don't see who would use this for their site.
My customers were in marketing. They already used these Office tools and they found it a real advantage that they could just continue to use these tools.
This was before WP got to the dominant position (and level of user-friendlyness) it has today. It's still possible though.
I worked in a large tech Co that used AEM for building web pages. I think one landing page took months, at least not less than one. If a content team can launch some simpler pages using this on their own, we would have definitely bought and used this.
I've taken some time to try to comprehend what this tool is doing, but I still don't get it. Could someone kindly clarify? Similar websites include http://webflow.com, https://siter.io, and http://www.squarespace.com. ? What exactly is this?
I understand:
Speed - ok, the same can do other platforms
Migration - ok same can do othe rplatforms
Create content in Microsoft Word or Google Docs - realy Adobe?
Stop wasting developer time on framework churn - start wasting time on Helix.
Thanks Adobe, 3 minutes of my life wasted to figure out that you have converted the bounce rate, after 2 second page load hesitation, to epic ragequit after 3 minutes of having to go through developper documentation to figure out whats the actual, tangible and practical experience you are trying to sell.
I will never trust Adobe on their development platforms after they were lying to developers about bright Flash future while silently killing it and wasting number of years of their careers on dead horse.
Flash was a Macromedia product that Adobe acquired. I don't think the team that worked on it foresaw the rapid shift to touchscreen mobile devices. Even so, there's no way Adobe could have competed with Apple and Google's push towards Javascript and HTML5 during those two companies early WebKit collaboration.
I wouldn't fault Adobe for at least trying to find a future for the technology they spent a lot of R&D on. I certainly wouldn't call them liars. If you missed the very public industry shift towards Javascript and HTML5, that's on you.
To be a devils advocate for a second, what did you expect them to do? If Adobe came out and said “flash is dead” too early, it would be the nail in the coffin. By waiting decade(s) past its peak usefulness to kill it, they probably kept more people in flash jobs for longer than they would have otherwise. And if you as a developer couldn’t see flash’s demise on the horizon, isn’t that at least partially on you?
> To be a devils advocate for a second, what did you expect them to do?
Open source the Flash Player code and work towards properly defining the SWF format. They could have kept their shiny IDE that a ton of people knew how to use and work with but also made it possible for Flash to become part of the open web - since it was actually useful.
This is something that they were repeatedly asked to do, but never ended up doing because Adobe wanted to have full control over it - and ended up having full control of something dead.
It’s also not like they killed the flash devs when the project ended. I’m pretty sure most of them were fine and able to learn new work somewhere else or in another dept.
Of all the places I expected to see a top comment attacking Adobe for killing flash… yea actually nevermind, it’s backwards enough to make sense here ;)
Is the market for flash devs really that different than similar software? I highly doubt those Flash devs ended up on the street.
Aside from that, Adobe has like 100 other pieces of software that creators have trusted going back to the early 80s. They have sustained millions and millions of successful careers.
If you're tea leaf reading skills were so underdeveloped to not see that Flash was doomed, then that's kind of on you to get better. Flash was being berated everywhere about its problems, yet it was still being pushed because it was the thing.
Flash had so so much against it even thouh it had a lot of things that make it sound like such a perfect solution. Write once, deploy anywhere...except there's a lot of baggage we're not going to tell you about. Eventually, that baggage is well understood and then exploited. The damn player released by the maker was the main vector before even running code written by any 14 year old. This was all before Jobs' little letter.
I will never give Adobe a penny again in my life after going through their abysmal cancellation process littered with dark patterns and manipulation for one of their subscriptions, on top of being charged a fee to cancel.
This is an interesting move by Adobe, which appears like the first step towards reasserting themselves in a hot WYSISWG CMS authoring market that’s currently dominated by folks like Webflow. What makes it even more interesting is that their enterprise CMS offering AEM (Adobe Experience Manager) will certainly get a leg up as it relates to ease/flexibility, further separating them from the market competition.
For the folks who are unaware, AEM is a tier 1 CMS powering many top-shelf enterprise websites[1], competing with products Contentful, Contentstack, Salesforce, etc.
I’m personally not a huge fan of their solution but they tick many of the boxes clients typically ask for.
It seems to be a no-code website builder for people who are already in the Adobe ecosystem. For one-off landing pages or websites an agency might build for projects this is probably a good fit if they are already all-in on Adobe.
The hate here in the comments seem to be around developers thinking they are the target group of this product when they are clearly not.
I agree that is clearly for non-developers that are in the Adobe ecosystem, however to me it's still unclear why they decided on this system. I thought about simple landing pages as well, but they state this in the faqs:
"You can use Helix for small sites because it is very easy to get started, but it works best for large sites with many authors, frequent updates, and lots of traffic."
Which confuses me a bit about which kind of pages they intended to be created in Helix. They also talk about Stripe integration for e-commerce shops.
> but it works best for large sites with many authors, frequent updates, and lots of traffic.
I could see it being used for short-lived high traffic sites like festivals, concerts, movie landing pages and other typical agency-created sites. These might have multiple authors to public posts, FAQ items and some small e-commerce components.
When you see the words “by Adobe” and loose all interest instantly.
Let me guess, whatever it is requires a Creative Cloud subscription?
I do remember when I was excited about Adobe stuff. 20 years ago. Since then, their virus-like “install a million things just to run Photoshop” and awful licensing practises have put them next to Oracle in the “avoid at all cost” category.
Agreed, I have a machine for which it is impossible to uninstall CC completely. I'd have to bust out a full drive wipe and OS reinstall just to get rid of an application. It's silly that tools for artists would need to hook so deeply into the OS and have no reasonable way to get rid of them.
well that's rich, that's exactly what I noticed on my GF MacBook Pro, always was putting off until later, good to know that it does not makes sense to spend time on this. Would love to find responsible and install My programs
One of the procurement team members from a client said: "Adobe is the most unpleasant vendor we work with". I was surprised and then they added: "We prefer working with Oracle". Somehow they have managed to out-Oracle Oracle.
I mean I hate adobe too, but being hated by the procurement team (who are usually incentivised by reducing spend) doesn't always mean that much.
Most procurement teams just love suppliers who will give them big quotes and then provide a 50% 'discount' so they can get a great big bonus for all the savings they achieved. Maybe i'm being too pessimistic.
I used to be like that but quite frankly nothing else comes near Photoshop and Lightroom Classic for me. The bottom end photo sub is cheap and you don't need to use any of the cloud stuff.
It's not you. Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator and InDesign are on a class of their own. Unfortunately, nothing comes close. If you don't like Premiere or After Effects, that are great choices. Not so much for the rest of the suite.
I'm rooting for Affinity, because of the buy vs rent business model and because Adobe need competition, but they still have a long ways to go
Readit News
> Helix dynamically renders HTML via Markdown that is generated from the content source documents. Markdown provides an abstraction as well as filter for content created in the various different data sources and strips all the formatting that cannot easily be projected into HTML semantics. This means you don’t have to worry about authors picking the wrong font, size, or color, Helix will take care that your final site looks as the design specs say.
So it's just generating a markdown document from my Word document and dynamically renders that to HTML. It seems like a weird SSG that isn't static, relies on proprietary files stored in either Google Drive or SharePoint, and seems to be aimed at Content Creators that are not tech savy at all (why else would you prefer Word over md files?).
However all that is still very confusing and it looks a bit like the project changed direction during development (e.g. there's still mention of GitHub as file storage which has been discontinued in the faqs etc.) I still don't see who would use this for their site.
The hard part in maintaining a website by a team of non-geeks is not a Markdown renderer, but the fact that people have their own preferred tools and workflows, and aren't keen on learning yet another one. All the extra export/import/sync steps are a pain for them, and cause chaos when collaborating. You update the Markdown version, someone else changes the Word version instead, a third person hates Word, and someone else puts notes on GitHub, and now you need to train half a dozen people how to clone a repo and how to fix a detached head.
Ages ago (probably more than 15 years or so) I generated HTML, even multi-page web sites from within Word itself, using VBA. It required some proficiency in VBA but Word already had a structure that you could translate with different classes of headings, font modifications, etc. - so it wasn't exactly "rocket science" either. I did the same in Excel, but here more focused on autogenerating pseudo "db-driven" sites than on prose.
Typically these would be "intranet" apps, but I believe some may have been exposed to the www. Being static sites, security was like any other pure HTML site.
> I still don't see who would use this for their site.
My customers were in marketing. They already used these Office tools and they found it a real advantage that they could just continue to use these tools.
This was before WP got to the dominant position (and level of user-friendlyness) it has today. It's still possible though.
I understand: Speed - ok, the same can do other platforms
Migration - ok same can do othe rplatforms
Create content in Microsoft Word or Google Docs - realy Adobe?
Stop wasting developer time on framework churn - start wasting time on Helix.
Is it a menstrual tracker?
I wouldn't fault Adobe for at least trying to find a future for the technology they spent a lot of R&D on. I certainly wouldn't call them liars. If you missed the very public industry shift towards Javascript and HTML5, that's on you.
Open source the Flash Player code and work towards properly defining the SWF format. They could have kept their shiny IDE that a ton of people knew how to use and work with but also made it possible for Flash to become part of the open web - since it was actually useful.
This is something that they were repeatedly asked to do, but never ended up doing because Adobe wanted to have full control over it - and ended up having full control of something dead.
Of all the places I expected to see a top comment attacking Adobe for killing flash… yea actually nevermind, it’s backwards enough to make sense here ;)
Aside from that, Adobe has like 100 other pieces of software that creators have trusted going back to the early 80s. They have sustained millions and millions of successful careers.
Flash had so so much against it even thouh it had a lot of things that make it sound like such a perfect solution. Write once, deploy anywhere...except there's a lot of baggage we're not going to tell you about. Eventually, that baggage is well understood and then exploited. The damn player released by the maker was the main vector before even running code written by any 14 year old. This was all before Jobs' little letter.
Since then I switched to PixelmatorPro and it works for all my needs.
https://services.harman.com/partners/adobe
"wasting number of years of their careers on dead horse"
The world keeps changing, it's on you for putting all your money on a horse that was obviously not going to make it.
For the folks who are unaware, AEM is a tier 1 CMS powering many top-shelf enterprise websites[1], competing with products Contentful, Contentstack, Salesforce, etc.
I’m personally not a huge fan of their solution but they tick many of the boxes clients typically ask for.
[1] https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/Adobe-Experience-Manager
It’ll be interesting to see how this develops…
The hate here in the comments seem to be around developers thinking they are the target group of this product when they are clearly not.
"You can use Helix for small sites because it is very easy to get started, but it works best for large sites with many authors, frequent updates, and lots of traffic."
Which confuses me a bit about which kind of pages they intended to be created in Helix. They also talk about Stripe integration for e-commerce shops.
I could see it being used for short-lived high traffic sites like festivals, concerts, movie landing pages and other typical agency-created sites. These might have multiple authors to public posts, FAQ items and some small e-commerce components.
Let me guess, whatever it is requires a Creative Cloud subscription?
I do remember when I was excited about Adobe stuff. 20 years ago. Since then, their virus-like “install a million things just to run Photoshop” and awful licensing practises have put them next to Oracle in the “avoid at all cost” category.
Most procurement teams just love suppliers who will give them big quotes and then provide a 50% 'discount' so they can get a great big bonus for all the savings they achieved. Maybe i'm being too pessimistic.
I'm rooting for Affinity, because of the buy vs rent business model and because Adobe need competition, but they still have a long ways to go
I think it's hilarious there are 20 comments here, and all are voicing confusion at what the product is and does?