Today brings with it an exciting new development for me personally, and the last piece of the puzzle for Kentico Developer magazine. The magazine is now in print and subscriptions are finally available!
It’s funny, but looking back over the last three months, the evolution of Kentico Developer reads like a poorly managed website rollout - an inability to meet high expectations due to technical limitations.
The struggle has been to make such a niche magazine commercially viable at a time when print media is seen to be a bad investment, without backing and with a very limited understanding of the work involved.
You see the technology does exist to kick off a magazine with little or no risk and you can do it with a limited understanding of print, but when it comes to print, the limitations don’t come with the technology. The limitations come with geography.
I first came across commercially viable print-on- demand last year, and was amazed by what I believed to be one of the most ground-breaking and disruptive technologies I’ve seen. Print-on-demand has the potential to level the playing field for printed material in the same way that the internet leveled the playing field for sales. Now anybody can create a magazine, or a newspaper, or even a book, in the same way that just about anyone can create an online store.
Unfortunately the only vendor able to produce a magazine of the quality we were expecting did not (and still does not) yet deliver outside of the United States, Canada or the UK. So, rather than the instant publishing of an issue that I expected, it’s taken nearly three months to get things off the ground.
We’ve now gone down the traditional route of working with a local printer, forecasting fixed print-run quan- tities based upon best guesstimates. It’s a frustratingly old-school high-risk way of working which coming from a technology background feels somehow wrong, but at the end of the day the quality is the same, the price is the same, the content is the same and we have finally evolved from the ezine we never set out to be into the magazine we always believed we were.
The coming year is now shaping up to be a very exciting time for Kentico Developer. We have ironclad agreements in place with new printers, new infrastructure, new software, new contributers, new columns, new sponsors, and new competitions. Kentico CMS version 5.0 is due for release bringing with it new pricing, new capabilities, and new opportunities. Kentico consulting services are up and running and should begin to provide new insight into the usage of Kentico and the pain points of those using it.
All in all it should be a great time to be a Kentico developer and I for one am looking forward to it.
In the meantime though, I hope you have a great Christmas, an awesome new year, and I’ll see you in 2010.
Richard Pendergast
Editor
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