CushyCMS
December 27, 2012
CushyCMS, New Alternative for End-User Editing
If you’re in web development, the odds are attractively good that you’ve worked with a content management system at some point. Letting the people who have possession of a site edit the genuine content (as opposed to the HTML markup and code) is a win all around: less need for the web developer to do routine work, additional control for the clients. But most CMS’s are complex, tough to install, and inflexible. A novel entrant in the market –
CushyCMS – aims to alter this.
Certain advantages with this system are stated below
Rather than spelling out precisely what the user can edit as part of a quantity of massive system, CushyCMS lets the developer cherry-pick content from a page to be edited. As a page designer, you apply special CSS classes to the segment of the page that should be changed by your client; CushyCMS does the rest. The net consequence is to make on hand an unlimited number of per-page custom editors. It works with single lines of text, entire dives, and even images. The workflow is pretty clear-cut. Subsequent to signing up with CushyCMS, you give it FTP information to connect to your server. It retrieves a list of pages and you pick and choose the ones that you want to make editable. Then you can request other people to visit your
CushyCMS page with “editor” privileges: they can edit the pages that you’ve made available, but not adjust server properties or put new pages on the list.
For editors, it’s a matter of signing in, picking the page, and waiting for CushyCMS to generate the editing form. Then when you save, it automatically uploads the entire page (with the user’s edits inserted at the appropriate spots) and uploads it back to the server via FTP.
It also covers some drawbacks as well
The service is at this time in beta, and slightly rocky – I hit some servers where, for whatever cause, it was unable to retrieve the list of available pages. But on the whole, this is a pleasant idea for an editing service, and I’ve got clients that it will be helpful with. It’s 100% free at the moment; in the prospect, they may bring in a paid version to consent to you to put your own branding on the editing pages. They’re making 150 spots in their beta available at the moment; sign up with the code BETA to get your shot at one.
The drawback
CushyCMS has is that you cannot add extra pages without the input of the developer (although the process is simple enough), so it is not much use for sites that want to grow their content.
