One year on - an update on GatherContent

There have been a few notable changes since RookieOven last covered GatherContent, which we described as Basecamp meets Google Docs with structure. They were last mentioned here on RookieOven on a Startup Spotlight feature last year and have since celebrated their first birthday and working on a host of exciting new updates.

Some of the new features coming to GatherContent include:

• A new WordPress plugin
• A New Drupal Module
• A comprehensive Helpdesk
• Doc.x and HTML export of projects and pages
• WordPress and Gathercontent

So why build these features? Mark Young of GatherContent gave some insights into the Product Development environment in GatherContent and why they chose to build these features.

WordPress

To us, and more importantly, to GatherContent users, connecting a powerful content production platform to a popular content publishing platform made sense.

Our WordPress plugin lets Gatherers export their content straight from GatherContent into their WordPress. We wanted to make the whole process of moving content into the CMS a lot easier. Mapping bits of content to specific fields within the CMS was a priority, so you can now import GatherContent pages as Pages, Posts, Media and various Custom Post Types.

We think it’s a much simpler way of importing to the CMS rather than copying and pasting bits of text from a word document! You can read more about it on our blog.

Drupal module

This add on sets out to do a lot of what our WordPress plugin does, and we aim to make it available within the next few weeks. Much like our WordPress update, The plugin will let you map content to certain fields in Drupalto allow you retain your structure and heavily customise your import.

New export options

Previously, we only had the option of exporting a whole project (not specific pages), and users could only export in .pdf format. Now our new functionality lets you export single pages to whole documents and you can choose to migrate content in a DocX or pdf. formal.

We will also be making a start on modules for ExpressionEngine and Joomla, and an extension for Magento too.

Helpdesk

Our help documentation was limited, so we spent some time making up in-depth walkthroughs and help videos.

New Writing Experience

As well as creating a cleaner writing interface (with fewer fields etc.), we are hoping to implement track changes too. That way, everybody knows who made alterations to a bit of content.

Mark tells me there’s lots more to come from the GatherContent team and urges you all to keep up with their developments on twitter or through their public roadmap.