We've come a long way, Baby! Not many people remember going into debug mode to figure out how to make some formatting changes in WordSmith, an ancient word processor. WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, MacWrite, and other tools, like laser printers, emerged to create documents better than typewriters. Still, documents were like traditional, typewritten documents. Then came desktop publishing. The Internet and www finally appeared.
Early web pages were still much like typewritten documents with some graphics pasted in and hyperlinks tying together a slew of related HTML documents. Borning by today's standards.
Desperate for a non-technical solution for regular people, I led a team to create a prototype content management system. Users could write a Microsoft Word document, save it as HTML, and upload it. Our tool fixed the crappy HTML rendered by Microsoft Word and posted it to a central server. The trouble was that we were too early in the technical cycle to get people (management) to understand the potential. Soon afterward, I was a project manager given the task of putting the policy documents of my agency, NRCS/USDA, up on the Internet for public access. I found a commercial tool that helped us manage the documents, but it was primitive. Nevertheless, it continued to run without maintenance (the product was bought and shelved by a large corporation) for several years after my retirement.
After retirement, I kept my skills sharp by building and maintaining a few XHTML-based websites. Then, I discovered Joomla 1.0. Desktop publishing for the web! The funny thing is that we were still mostly bound up in the traditional document layout: A hierarchical, database-structured view of documents presented with menus to documents in specific categories. It was much better than writing XHTML, and then there was CSS styling--a remarkable improvement on style sheets from word processing documents and inline formatting of HTML.
With JoomShaper's SP Pagebuilder, the paradigm shifted back to a page-based system. Built on top of Joomla's structure, the core components were integrated into page layouts. Rather than loading and positioning modules in predefined blocks of the template, PageBuilder offered built-in elements to replace many modules. We could install conventional modules in pages at many locations, not just those predefined in the templates.
After multiple upgrades, PageBuilder is at version 5.4. I've seen nothing that really compares well to it.
Part II: Things I've learned that help make using PageBuilder easier.
