CushyCMS - The Simple and Practical CMS Solution

August 19, 2008 | under CMS | 6 Responses

When developing websites for clients, I often find that they either don’t have the time to learn a content management system like Joomla and Drupal, or they get overwhelmed by the dozens of publishing features. Sometimes you just need to change the paragraph on the front page, and for that you need a web app like CushyCMS.

CushyCMS allows you to effortlessly turn your static XHTML/CSS template into a functional CMS. How cushy is that?

Choosing to allow/disallow intro text, enable trackbacks/pings, changing title alias, etc are all things that a dedicated student or full-time publisher should know - not your average Joe. CushyCMS was created for developers and designers to allow what sections their client could safely edit on their website. By simply adding class=”cushycms” to any tag in your document, that area then becomes editable by the client.

You tell CushyCMS which users can edit what from within the user management dashboard of your account. If you find yourself using this program for more than three clients, go ahead and upgrade to the pro plan. This allows you to brand CushyCMS to your liking. And for $28.00 a month, you can have a client login that looks like this.

When modifying your template to allow for CushyCMS editing, I recommend creating additional div’s solely to hold the class=”cushycms” so that you don’t have multiple class attributes properties embedded in one tag and thus breaking XHTML validity. use <div class=”class1 cushycms”> to get a xhtml valid results as opposed to having two attributes like <div class=”class1″ class=”cushycms”>.

CushyCMS is a great web app for any freelancer who wants to give their client control over the content but not control over the entire site.

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6 Responses to CushyCMS - The Simple and Practical CMS Solution

  1. One note. Multiple classes isn’t invalid XHTML.

    Otherwise, yea, Cushy seems pretty neat and easy to turn in, from what I’ve seen.

    Sean McArthur

    8/19/2008 at 1:11 pm

  2. @Sean McArthur, Create a blank template that is XHTML Transitional, and create a div tag within the body like so: <div class=”container” class=”cushycms”> and it will bring up the error, “duplicate specification of attribute “class”.” So, it does break validity.

    You are right that you can have multiple class attributes, but they may not be contained within the same tag.

    Tommy M

    8/19/2008 at 1:18 pm

  3. @Tommy M To use multiple classes you would write it like:
    class=”class1 class2″
    You don’t use multiple class attribute, but multiple class values.

    Andrew

    8/19/2008 at 1:49 pm

  4. It’s a bit too simple for most sites maybe (no news archive, no control over menus…that I know of), but it looks great and seems really easy to implement/use. For my clients I would rather use a hosted CMS that does cost, so that you know that they will fix bugs when I/they find them.
    And the only real reason I haven’t tried it yet (on my own servers) is that I would never trust a company, that I don’t know better, with my FTP-account. I just couldn’t (nor would I like to) do that. Am I too protective of my own passwords? :)

    Christofer

    8/19/2008 at 3:27 pm

  5. I think it’s a great solution for making a site almost idiot proof for the end user who wishes to update their site from time to time. Just trying to make things more simple. Sometimes less is more. I don’t think you are being irrational in being protective of the ftp access, maybe there could be a workaround in progress. Cool little cms though.

    JMarsh

    8/20/2008 at 6:40 pm

  6. If you have a remote webhost, they can access your site even easier than the folks over at CushyCMS. Just something to think about…how secure is secure if it’s not on your own box. For most sites I do (small, static, brochure sites), this was perfect. Alas, it seemed to good to be true and I found a few things flaky, but I easily learned to work around them.

    Recentently I’ve discovered another similar CMS called Surreal CMS and I’m giving that a test drive. They use class=”editable” so I did a find/replace for ‘cushycms’ and i was up and running in no time. Looks good so far, but we’ll see. The URL if you want it is http://surrealcms.com/

    Freddy

    12/9/2008 at 8:58 pm

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