Welcome back. If you have been following my articles about Resalient, the engineering process, or even CRM development, then you know I want to add an external Portal component so that my future customers will be able to host a single small-business solution for both their Content Management System (CMS/Website) as well as an internal one for tracking customers (CRM.)

By trade, I am a Dynamics CRM solutions architect; and I have worked on large federal contracts with the Department of Defense and the Department of State as well as large contracts for fortune 500 companies like Microsoft and Pactiv. On a personal level, this makes me impossible to market, because I work across multiple verticals and horizontals to create the solutions no one else can. Sorry. Not Sorry.

During the lulls in my industry, I return to doing custom development on my hobby project Resalient. As a Dynamics CRM architect, I often encounter clients who need the capability of Dynamics Portals but whose IT department does not want to know why the technology has a high initial investment in time to get up and running as compared to other technologies for which their IT is more qualified. While explaining those challenges might be interesting, they are only related to Resalient in so far as I want to create a different ecosystem for allowing users to create engaging frontend experiences.

Honestly, when trying to come up with the design, I wanted everything: drag&drop widgets, bootstrap enabled smart layouts allowing zero or more images, the ability to effortlessly import a $20 template without having to pay for a developer....Even just that last item was getting me to a cart and horse issue trying to solve an entwined and tangled issue all at once.

Recognizing I was trying to solve everything at the same time, I have decided to go back to basics again. By starting with a few manual conversions of HTML templates into reusable Razor templates, I have allowed muscle memory to guide me on a design for tackling the process incrementally.

I have deleted a lot of work I spent the last month developing; and when it eventually leads me to a better solution, I will count both the now deleted code and the current iterations as guiding lights that pointed me toward an even better solution.

For the moment, my goal cannot remove a developer from the process; but I can reduce the level of talent needed so that a college student should have a reasonable chance at success for minimal effort spent. Can you Copy&Paste sections of an HTML template from a text editor into a content box? Then you might be the ideal user for my next iteration of the CMS component of Resalient.

Either way, thank you for being part of the journey.