Review of CushyCMS
A few days ago, I came upon the CushyCMS website www.cushycms.com
I’ve tried using Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla! and Mambo, and I’m not going to pretend this is better than them all. It’s not, it just meets a different need. Whereas CMSs such as Wordpress are great if you want to make a site with a blog, have the ability to add pages, plugins, and change themes, sometimes sites don’t need all that functionality. Maybe on a 5 page site, you just want to be able to let the client change a few words every now and then, so a full-blown CMS can be a little overwhelming.
Here’s how CushyCMS works:
in your HTML file, you define the bits you want to be editable by adding class=”cushycms”
so a heading could be tagged as
<h1 class=”cushycms” title=”Heading”></h1>
and the editable content
<div class=”cushycms” title=”Main Content”></div>
Trying it out
I thought I’d give it a go with a small project I was working on. It says it is standards compliant, and I had a look at the company that created it to reassure myself. It’s built by Stateless Systems based in Australia www.statelesssystems.com and their other projects look quite interesting too: an alternative PDF viewer, a login sharing system to allow people to bypass web registration, and a coupon sharing site.
I created an account, typed in my FTP details, and browsed for the pages I’d given classes. It seemed a little sluggish, but that may have been a slow connection at my end. I would have liked to have been able to assign more than one page at a time, as selecting the file, waiting for it to load, and doing the process again seemed a little monotonous.
Editing Content
The pages I’d assigned displayed in a list with a little edit icon. Clicking on this takes me to a form. There is a field for each of the classes I’d assigned, and the interface looks quite similar to if I were sending an email, which is nice for less technically experienced clients. I guess it could be compared to Contribute which is what I would have considered using instead.
At the moment, I’m labeled as ‘Designer’ in the menu, which I guess is Administrator. I can assign editors to the site, and they get a stripped down version of what I can see. As an editor I can’t add pages, but if I wanted to do that, I would be looking for a more functional CMS.
Assigning Editors
One thing that I wanted to do but couldn’t was to create more than one Administrator. The administrator can assign many websites and editors to their account, but there can only be one administrator to each account. I also can’t make multiple accounts with the same email address, which I suppose is to encourage people to upgrade to a Pro account (which costs $28 a month - around £15). This lets you brand the CMS and have unlimited sites and editors.
The Prognosis
To sum up, I think CushyCMS is a great solution for small sites that don’t need content changed that often, as it gives the client more control. Also, some CMSs make me feel quite restricted in how I design the site. At the moment, I feel like I have to design sites around the CMS, but I prefer to design a site, and have the CMS integrate into it. Maybe being able to do this comes with experience!
I’m tempted to take the plunge to Pro when I have enough of these types of projects to make it worthwhile. I’d really appreciate your opinions on whether you think this is a good solution, or if it will turn my code into scrambled egg.
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 11:34 pmand is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
6 Responses to “Review of CushyCMS”
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July 9th, 2008 at 10:54 am
I don’t use anything other than Sitellite (http://www.sitellite.org/). Give it a go!
July 9th, 2008 at 11:37 am
This sounds too good to be true! I also have some clients who only want to be able to make a few simple text changes to a mostly static site, and installing and setting up a whole blog package for them is too much trouble. I’ve reluctantly used Contribute for those clients insistent on it (cos they’ve already been using it), but that (for my part) is as much hassel to set up as a blog - and the client always runs into bugs and problems with it. I found it a little difficult to understand quite how you get to edit the pages, so went to their site to watch the screencast and got a page not found error! Not a good sign! Anyway thanks for the review, I am definitely going to give it a test drive.
July 9th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Another cool feature is that because you set it up with FTP access to your site it means you can also make Server-side code like PHP and ASP.NET etc editable to users through CushyCMS too. Which is good as I could use it to work on my sites server-side code from anywhere in the world that has a browser.
Is it not cheaper to get a new GMail account per site. Unless you are making loads of sites. like anna_@gmail.com, anna_@gmail.com could be harder to manage, but free. I could be talking bollocks!
Ollie
July 9th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
Not heard of it, but looks reasonable: the only bit I don’t like the look of is having to provide FTP info!
Would be useful for those fiddly bits of text in templates that need editing - e.g. copyright notices - though.
July 11th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
I had a look at the demo video (once their website came back online - it was down for some time) and it sure does look easy peasy. But I have 2 serious concerns:
1. Putting in FTP details, like Richard says above. You are making yourself very vunerable to be putting your ftp details into this other company’s hands. If they have a security breach, then your website is also compromised.
2. Relying on their server to access your own website. If their site goes down (like it was when I tried to check it out the other day) then your clients will be unable to update their own website.
One more comment in reply to yours Anna: you shouldn’t feel like you have to design a site around the CMS - so yes, I do feel that with practice you can design a site and then plug a CMS into it. My favourite for this would be Expression Engine. In fact I’m thinking of doing a live documentary via my new blog recording the design and set up process using EE - so you can see how easily it can be done, and how flexible it is. Check out my Gradualism blog (linked above) shortly to follow this process!
July 29th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Thanks for the thorough review.
I would have to second Emily’s recommendation and encourage you to explore EE. It is a bit more involved than Cushy, but much more flexible than wordpress.