The state of Substance development

[Michael Aufreiter]

IMPORTANT!

First off, sorry for not being able to answer your questions in a timely fashion. It's just a time issue I have now, as I started working fulltime in Washington DC this March.

However, Substance is still being actively developed. We just shifted our priorities, and this comes with some implications affecting the deployed version (substance.io), which won't see too many updates during the next months.

Here's why:

• We're aware of the issues our current implementation has and we're working hard to fix it.
• Instead of touching the existing implementation we started to do a full rewrite of the editing component, considering all lessons learned during the last 1,5 years.
• We're splitting things apart. There will be a dedicated editing component "The Substance Composer" that you can use in your own application and customize it to your particular needs. 
• We'll invest all our time into the infrastructure and documentation, making it easy for you developers to create your own variations of the editor.

Our claim:

It's impossible to create an editor that works for everyone.

Our solution:

Provide an easy way for communities to build their own editor

Here's more:

http://www.slideshare.net/_mql/substanceio-content-is-data

According to our current plan the new Substance stack will consist of three components:

The Substance Library

The Substance Library is different from traditional libraries, in that there are no books stored but digital documents that are always up-to-date. Everyone with permission can read and write documents at any time. Open 24/7. You can consider it a generic storage interface for arbitrary structured Substance documents. And it will have an API for manipulating docs programmatically.

The Substance Composer

The Substance Composer is a foundation for building your own editor tailored for you particular usecase. You can extend basic content types such as Text, Sections and Images with custom types such as Maps, Formulas, or pre-structured types such as an Event content type that allows you entering name, date, organizer etc. You can add whatever you can imagine, the sky is the limit. But here comes the bummer: You need to do it yourself. Our mission is to make it very easy for you, by creating an infrastructure for basic operations such as inserting, moving and deleting nodes, and a generic UI for dealing with patches and comments.

Substance.io: 

The community edition, free to use for everyone. It will support a basic content types such as Sections, Text, Images and Maps.

Substance is an ambitious project, and we want to create a community around it to make it happen. It will take us some time, but we're really aware of how important it is to make it easy for developers to contribute. The way digital publishing works today is broken and needs to be fixed. And we won't give up until this has been done. No matter if Substance will be that thing, or another project. Substance is not about building a product, it's about implementing an idea.

And let me say... thank you so much for all the support! I'm impressed how many people are seriously interested in the project and this keeps me going, since I feel there's serious demand for it. Thanks! :)

I'm looking forward to what's coming next. Let me know if you have any questions.

-- Michael

[Mariangela Petrizzo]

I have recently used Substance.io and I'm very interested in apply it in a local instance for my own work for a total substitution of gdocs (for example) I think that, maybe, all this components that you have been talking about will be available also for local installations?

Do you think is better for me either wait for the new version of substance or install it right know and use it?

I only have one question about Substance.io performance and is about the "missing" documents that you can hardly work but at the end of the day you can reach only to see a blank document. I only can "fix it" by pressing the "publish" button.

Thanks for alll your effort

Mariángela