If you asked me, “what is the worst Microsoft product you’ve ever used?” I would probably reply with the word ‘FrontPage’. Then most people stare at me for a moment and say, “I thought you were going to say Windows Me.”
It’s true; Windows Me was a very rushed project and had countless issues with stability and general design. However, I hold up FrontPage as the worse product because it stuck around longer and did more damage to the web, while Windows Me was just laughed off stage by the general public.
FrontPage’s problem – or rather, one of its problems, for there were several – was that it targeted a novice audience and provided a WYSIWYG interface. There’s no problem with either of these things, it’s the combination that makes them bad. Contrary to popular (or perhaps, elitist) opinion, WYSIWYG can be a powerful tool in the hands of an experienced developer who understands the HTML/CSS behind it. In the hands of a novice, it easily creates two things: websites that are complete rubbish and web designers who have no real technical understanding of how websites work.
So when I first stumbled upon WebMatrix (Microsoft’s newest attempt at capturing the novice web designer audience) back in August, my stomach churned with dread. Memories of FrontPage came flooding back faster than you can say the word “frameset”.
After reminding myself that it isn’t fair to judge a product you’ve never used solely on the history of the developer, I decided to give WebMatrix a shot. Astonishingly, it’s actually not that bad.
The first major thing I noticed was that there is no WYSIWYG interface, which was a bit of a shock. The editor is essentially a standard code editor with line numbers and syntax highlighting for multiple languages such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It also has highlighting for a number of server-side languages including – much to my surprise – PHP.
Auto-completion has been added with the WebMatrix 2 beta and it’s more or less what you would expect from Microsoft’s IntelliSense team. It provides easy access to reference material for a variety of languages. I feel this is especially important with PHP because it has a very large, relatively unorganized, inconsistently named collection of functions that no human could possibly memorize. It’s such an important feature that I think not including it in the original release of WebMatrix was a mistake.
WebMatrix's autocomplete (IntelliSense) showing some PHP functions
Along with autocomplete, the WebMatrix 2 beta also introduces an inline colour picker.
There’s not much else to say about the code editor. It’s relatively light on some of the more advanced features that have become commonplace in most IDEs; code folding, for example, is notably absent.
With the WebMatrix 2 beta in front of me, I decided to try deploying one of the available CMS options. I went with WordPress for two reasons. Firstly, I wanted to see WebMatrix working with a product not designed for a Microsoft platform (WordPress is powered by PHP and MySQL, both of which can run on Windows but it’s not the same as a CMS specifically designed for the Windows environment like DotNetNuke). Secondly, WordPress is something I’m already very familiar with (this blog runs on WordPress, in case you didn’t notice).
Site from Web Gallery
Because WebMatrix is bundled with an express version of IIS 7.5 (which it uses as a local testing environment), when I downloaded WordPress I was also forced to download PHP and MySQL versions for IIS.
One thing I noticed with the WordPress installation was that I wasn’t able to specify my own database name and credentials. This can be a problem on shared hosting where users are sometimes forced to have their database names prefixed with their username or something similar. In this instance, it was necessary to manually edit the configuration file after WordPress was uploaded to the server.
The upload was done over FTP; Web Deploy was offered as an alternative publishing method but once again, that’s an IIS specific feature and here we’re dealing with Apache on FreeBSD.
The FTP transfer succeeded without issue but I was very disappointed with the transfer monitoring tools (or lack thereof). The user is presented with a yellow box at the bottom of the window which displays the path to the current file at the top of the transfer queue along with links to cancel the transfer and to view the transfer log. It does not indicate fundamental information you would expect from the most basic FTP clients like how many files have finished transferring; how many files are still in the queue; the size, transfer rate or progress of the file currently at the top of the queue.
WordPress being deployed via FTP
Furthermore, clicking the “Log” link opens a static copy of the log in Notepad. There are so many things wrong with this. The log is not updated on the user’s screen in real time (you have to close notepad and click the link again to reopen the latest version). Notepad being a plain text editor, you also miss out on highlighting and a lot of other useful features often used in logging systems. The whole FTP experience feels overly simplified to the point that it’s just barely functional. I’m not sure if this is because Microsoft wants to encourage people to use Web Deploy or because they just haven’t had a chance to work on the FTP side of things. All I can say is the FTP interface needs a lot of attention.
WebMatrix's FTP log
With all of the above said, it’s hard to see how WebMatrix is really much of an improvement over traditional methods when it comes to deploying a CMS like WordPress. It uses more or less the same process but it seems like there’s more hoops to jump through and I’m not sure what the goal is supposed to be. Once you have the CMS installed you shouldn’t really have to do much more coding, if any at all (we’re targeting the novice market, remember). In that case, you’re basically using WebMatrix as a crippled FTP browser; even Windows Explorer would be a better option.
Getting back to user-created content, WebMatrix basically combines a file browser, a code editor, and a simplified IIS management interface into one package. The local project management works pretty well from what I can see and the tabbed editor provides a good coding experience especially given the addition of autocomplete.
Overall I think it’s a great project with a lot of potential, but there is significant room for improvement. I’m still undecided as to whether I would recommend WebMatrix to an amateur web developer. If all you’re looking to do is deploy an existing CMS like WordPress, don’t bother. Stick to the installation instructions bundled with those packages; at this point, WebMatrix adds nothing of substance to the process. If on the other hand you’re starting a site from scratch or you’re learning the basics of HTML/CSS, well this might just be the tool for you.
