I am in the process of redesigning/remaking a site for a non-profit organization. Their site is, as of now, a collection of static HTML pages which are unintelligible to the average non-profit worker. On top of wanting a new look for their site, they are looking for a way to edit their pages’ content without screwing up all the HTML and without having to directly edit any files at all. They have no need for a blog, an online application, or anything that is more than just blurbs and information.
I could use edit forms combined with PHP and a database in a password protected area of the site; I could use an in-depth content management system like Drupal to handle the editing user interface for me. But all I need is a way to change the content of the HTML pages every once in a while.
The perfect solution is CushyCMS. CushyCMS is actually hardly a content management system. All it is, is a way to edit specific parts of an HTML file using a WYSIWYG editor. You don’t have to install anything on your site; in fact, all you have to do is add class="cushycms" to the tags containing parts of the page you want editable. The coolest thing is that you can add the class to any type of tag (div, p, h1, span, even image) and have it be editable. Then you go to CushyCMS’s website, give it your FTP information, and you can start editing your content right away.
A great feature of Cushy is that you can add “editors” who can edit pages of your choice and have their own login. So you can give all the clients’ workers the ability to edit their own pages hassle-free, without worrying about all the technical stuff like FTP and HTML.
CushyCMS makes it impossibly easy to give your site client-friendly capabilities without using any back-end coding at all. I would recommend using it to anyone that is making a site for clients who plan to only change little bits of content on their site at a time (a “Current News Story” page perhaps).
As a CMS, Cushy is no Wordpress, but it is great at making content easy for clients to edit.
July 18, 2009
CushyCMS: Not Much, but Great at What it Does
1:34 pm
June 6, 2009
Topsy: A Cool Idea
6:05 pm
If you haven’t already, you should check out Topsy, a new search engine powered by tweets on Twitter. As opposed to using brute force and following links like Google and all the other search engines out there, Topsy parses every single tweet for links, and adds them to its database. So instead of giving you just the most relevant results (boring), like Google, Topsy dishes out the sites that the most people are talking about.
Topsy is where Twitter meets Digg, and I think there is nowhere that this site can go but up. It will be interesting to see what happens to it as Twitter becomes more and more widely used to spread websites.
