Steem Think Tank: Customized Frontend as a Service
So I made this community Steem Think Tank to be a place to throw out ideas such as this one, but I probably should have done the VERY FIRST post about the community in the community, oh well. Check out that post to see what this community is all about.
Anyway, as communities develop and eventually make their way out of beta, I think that now more than ever, the idea of a customized frontend as a service could be extremely lucrative. Ideally I'd really like it if Steemit.com had a lot of visual customization features, but as time goes on and the content shared here gets more and more diverse I think catering to every possible layout that people might want becomes untenable.
I think there will be a huge opportunity for some smart peeps to come together and offer Communities customized frontends for different content types. Moving us into a more wordpressy situation where people can make condenser or nitrous forks and reskin them in a million different ways then sell those on an open digital marketplace.
This will of course open up more opportunity to monetize communities as each one of these can have its own ad revenue, it's own token, etc.
Of course Steem Engine is already doing this in a sort of phase one sort of way in that it's offering a separate frontend, but it's all the same frontend. Without getting too crazy into design I think it would be a safe bet to make a template for communities that are more about socialization, more about videos, and more about imagery.
Just taking those three foundations and building variants I think would add a lot of value. I've made some mock ups for different communities layouts, but this sort of thing is what I'm talking about. Also some of the view options from Steempeak are good examples of what might make for a good default layout for a very content specific community.(like mine, yes, I just want you all to make me shit, but other people could use it to 😃)
Anywho, that's that idea. I don't know how to build it but I'd pay good money for it. I'm guessing others would to. What do you think? Let me know in the comments!
A builder for steem (with templates and drag/drop blocks for the people with the brilliant ideas and exactly no idea whatsoever how to build a website) would be winning, I think.
And it will have to be someone else's winning as I only know how to do such templates for Drupal and I really don't want to get back into webdev (except for myself and my glorified blogsite XD)
Yea, it seems like right now the focus is building tools to empower developers, which is definitely super important and necessary, but there are WAY more non-developers than developers and I think developing more tools for regular people would explode the number of people seeing steem as a value add for whatever it is they want to do.
There are but once the developers are empowered they'll make the tools for everyone else.
Patience is not really a thing these days though XD
Can SteemPress be sufficient for this? Ideally, it will allow anyone to set up whatever frontend they wish. Certainly SteemPress has more progress to make, but to my mind it seems like a really good approach because all the WordPress ecosystem can be tapped into, and all the Steem ecosystem can be tapped into, if the link between the two is sufficiently good. So, in essence, work on making a good link rather than on rebuilding everything that has been built so far in e.g. the WordPress ecosystem (CMS, templates, plugins, etc.).
Possibly, but as far as I know they're working on solutions for individual blogs, not an entire frontend with several blogs + additional features that are exclusive to steem.