For this year's Django Dash three of us made a little web app to help freelancers and small companies manage proposals to clients. Maybe some of you would find it useful.
I'm interested in why you opted for a name tied to such a specific use case.
Surely there are lots of other document types where this kind of service could come in handy. Briefly and just off the top of my head: CVs/résumés, marketing mailshots, blog posts...
Was it an intentional choice to try and limit the scope of the application?
You're definitely right -- the concept can be used in lots of other places. We talked about this a bunch, and decided that we'd stick with proposals.
If we tried to make the user interface general enough to support any kind of document it would get more complicated. Off the top of my head, we'd need:
* Arbitrary keywords, not just "client names".
* More help text to explain how things work, give examples, etc.
* Probably some more options for the layout of the result, like "show date".
We decided to go with the "do one thing well" approach partly to avoid this extra UI complexity, partly because we only had 48 hours to make it, and partly because "Proposalmatic" is a much cooler/stronger name than "Document-maker".
The site could be easily forked, reskinned and set up for another type of document though. It really fits perfectly with the resume idea -- I hadn't thought of that particular case before. Maybe we should make a "Resume-o-matic" sister site.
Possibly a naive question but: did you use a css template or something to make that design? I have a hell of a time making sites look that great in 48 hrs...
[+] [-] stevelosh|14 years ago|reply
The code is at https://bitbucket.org/dwaiter/proposalmatic if you're interested. Warning: there are definitely a few messy sections since it was built in two days.
[+] [-] roam|14 years ago|reply
(But I think you guys forgot to filter the proposal queryset by account in the SnippetForm.)
[+] [-] philbo|14 years ago|reply
Surely there are lots of other document types where this kind of service could come in handy. Briefly and just off the top of my head: CVs/résumés, marketing mailshots, blog posts...
Was it an intentional choice to try and limit the scope of the application?
[+] [-] stevelosh|14 years ago|reply
If we tried to make the user interface general enough to support any kind of document it would get more complicated. Off the top of my head, we'd need:
We decided to go with the "do one thing well" approach partly to avoid this extra UI complexity, partly because we only had 48 hours to make it, and partly because "Proposalmatic" is a much cooler/stronger name than "Document-maker".The site could be easily forked, reskinned and set up for another type of document though. It really fits perfectly with the resume idea -- I hadn't thought of that particular case before. Maybe we should make a "Resume-o-matic" sister site.
[+] [-] ulf|14 years ago|reply
"Use ProposalMatic to save snippets of text that you use often and mix and match to create personalized proposals" This really struck me as odd...
[+] [-] stevelosh|14 years ago|reply
And yeah, the copy wasn't number one on the todo list. We'll clean it up and flesh it out once the sites are unfrozen from the judging process.
[+] [-] scotto|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sawyerh|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevelosh|14 years ago|reply