Milk is a framework designed to make website management absolutely painless for the average computer user, and fast and fun for the more technically talented. We designed it with the goal in mind that the owner of the website should be able to change simple things like the content without having to wait for a website administrator to get around to doing it. As with any software project, it has grown and evolved into a rich website editor, simple enough for any average internet user and yet with enough features and customization to satisfy those with more programming experience.
Milk is based on the idea of components, or pieces of a page such as header, footer, body, images, etc. When we design a website for you, we develop several different components. An example of this is on this site. The Creationix site has four main components: "head" (the navigation bar), "body" (the content, or words, on every page), "foot" (footer), and "bighead" (the bigger, prettier navigation bar on the front page). Most pages are just the first three, but the front page uses the "bighead" component instead of the "head" component for a custom header on that page. The site owner is free to mix and match the components on any page. They fit together just like the pieces of the construction toy pictured on this page.
Each Milk component has a unique editing interface for changing, say, the image used in the "bighead" component or the links in the "foot" component. We design each one to be as user-friendly as possible and will include tutorials about how to edit each component.
Milk also has versioning support, which acts as a very smart "undo" button. If you change the site, keep it a few days, and then decide you liked it better before, you can go back to the previous version. If you go back to that previous version and make a change or two, then it is saved as a brand-new version. This way no change you make is ever lost.
Skim Milk is a lightweight framework. It was the very first complete rendition of our idea of an easy-to-use website editor. It does not have components, which means the page layout isn’t quite as flexible since every page has the exact same header and footer. The content is edited using a simple language called Markdown.
Markdown is a very simple way to edit the content of your site. Editing Markdown is so easy, for the most part it will feel just like typing a paragraph. We’ve included the WMD editor to make it even easier; for example, to make a word bold all you have to do is highlight the word and click the "bold" button on the toolbar. We included a live preview of the page in the editor, so as you change the content you see exactly what it will look like when you save it.
We like the WMD editor and Markdown because while they are very easy for a complete newbie to learn, they also don’t hide any details from an experienced HTML coder. This allows you to jump in and start editing your page with no background knowledge of HTML, and at the same time you are free to learn HTML at whatever pace you wish to add more customization to the text of your site because Markdown allows embedding of raw HTML. In fact, if you are already comfortable with HTML and for whatever reason don’t like Markdown, you are free to write all of your content in HTML.
This Markdown editor is ususally the main component used on the Milk framework as well, in the "body" component.