CushyCMS Beta Launch: Free Invites For TechCrunch Readers

I just signed up. At a glance this looks FUCKING AWESOME. I’m building a test site now. More later.

These guys make some pretty websites.

wheres jennifer? i need to see vag immediately

That sure is a neat idea… my company developed a few of these for other customers but I never thought of creating a CMS’ed site which can be shared with others… best of luck Guy!

Jon
http://woodmarvels.com - Create Unique Memories!

i wish there was cms for making social networking sites, drupal and cms like these don’t support all the regular features that are needed. in the end you have to make ur own module which as the same as making it from scratch.

Thanks for the word! FYI that the invite code is case sensitive.

Does anyone have any tips for finding business partners? I need a tech guy to join me!

This products looks very promising, couldn’t you guys get some more invites???

Diego
http://blog.diegocadenas.com

Seems to be a very simple concept — define editable area using HTML class so CushyCMS can grab it and push back the new content using FTP onto your hosted server. It actually puts more work onto designers so they have to (1) define editable area in HTML (2) set it up in CushyCMS.

What has been shown here is also very easy to replicate as well (FTP and HTML parsing code in regular expression in the backend + some pretty frontend). Nice (but very simple) project. It is more focused on niche market (freelance designers) than general public (like RetailMeNot or BugMeNot) so not sure whether it will have the same impact as RMN and BMN.

I just tried it out. Impressive. Seems a little buggy dealing with Apache server. Few things I noticed.

1. FTP Sessions. Every page turn (or page back), turns on (1) session and within 2-3 pages back, i am out of 3 sessions and ftp logs me out.

2. Published it…but proxy server..error..

These are minor bugs…that can easily be fixed (after all it is a pre-beta launch) but this site is fantastic. I love it. I know my clients and my developers will…it makes our life a lot easier.

Chris

hmm..sounds interesting. now i am eagerly waiting to try it out.

Ah - he says ” you don’t need to be a programmer to use it ” but immediately launches his ‘editor of choice’ to start adding class files to html code. How is this ‘easy for beginners’ ?

#11 - thanks for the feedback… we should be closing all FTP sessions we open pretty much simultaneously but we’ll go back and have another look. Proxy server error sounds a little more mysterious- if you could send more details to enquiries@cushycms.com it sure would be appreciated.

#12 - changing html isnt generally considered ‘programming’ and something that even beginner designers are accustomed to doing. The actual content editors don’t have to touch any of this stuff of course.

This is fantastic! One of my current client wants to have a second editor (who happens to be a 60year old lady) edit content of a single page. I’m still wondering how to do this. so you can imagine this is a godsend.

When is this going out of beta and can i integrate my clients page to this right now?

sorry maybe i can find answer to all of this if i can maintain my excitement! you dont understand, i would have been forced to train her in dreamweaver

i’ve tested it out. and put a site up on http://ditoweb.info

the page is butt ugly but the service does work with very little setup.

bugs / limitations:

- photos are not showing up in the interface - a person may not know what image they are editing. I assume this is not intended as the photos are showing in the presentation video above.

-img tags only allow upload from machine, you can not link to a photo on the web with the current layout. not so bad but…

-editable text areas allow images to be added but ONLY through a web link (opposite of img tag behavior). Please allow both methods of adding an image in both interfaces

This could be a great solution for a small scale web design company like mine, which caters to small businesses, who often want frequent updates.

This will also allow them to correct their own typos and spelling errors.

Thanks, I think I will use this service quite a bit.

#14 - hehe thanks for the kind words. Our hard working programmers sure will appreciate this sort of feedback.

We plan on removing the ‘beta’ label in ~1 week. There’s nothing stopping you from integrating right now and adding editors (they don’t require a beta code).

Also- if you want to request any additional features then let us know:
http://cushycms.uservoice.com/

Ta!

I’ve got a dumb question here: Does this conflict with CSS classes on the page? Are we just setting two class attributes for elements that also have CSS classes? (ex. test).

#17 - will work of course

#17 - woops, my html got removed. You just apply multiple classes to the same element e.g. class=”test cushycms”

test

Since ‘guy from crushycms.com’ seems to be watching the comments, I have a couple of questions.

1. Is it possible for a content editor to add new pages? From the demo, it looks like only the admin has that ability. Without this it would be impossible to manage something as simple as a blog (assuming you want each post to have a permalink). And even with this ability, it would be a little cumbersome to have to create what is essentially a new html page for every blog post.

2. Can it handle class=”cushycms” elements inside other cushycms tagged elemnts?

It would be great if the editors could also create pages based on a template that the designer had uploaded. The only thing i dont like is that its primarily used for editing current pages and not creating new pages.

#22 - Really good questions.

Content editors can’t add pages for the following reasoning:

1. We don’t want to cut designers out of the loop entirely (they need to make money still)
2. Editors/clients aren’t always capable of making the best decisions when it comes to information architecture, naming conventions, etc
3. We decided to choose simplicity over creating yet another blog/enterprise CMS solution

Nested editable areas- this will appear a little funky at this stage (it’s on our todo list). Programmer Shane says: “you’ll get a predictable but difficult-to-explain result” at this stage

Thanks Duncan

We got in. Wrote a post too

Network Weblogs

@Guy:
I’m a big fan of simplistic, specialized tools that do specific jobs. But, without the ability to create dynamic content based on a template I can’t think of a single project I’ve ever worked on that would benefit from something like this.
It’s only slightly simpler than downloading the HTML file, replacing some text or img src or whatnot, and re-upping the file. Granted, this is an overly complex task for a certain group of users.
But I mean, based on the video, because headings, images and other elements are edited outside of the wysiwyg, it doesn’t even look like you’d be able add repeating content - like a news update - to an existing page.

“predictable but difficult-to-explain results” are the best kind.

@Ryan:
Repeatable content templates aren’t out of the question if our users want it (cushycms.uservoice.com) but for now we’re focused on making this as simple as possible (so simple that even our parents could use it).

There are already a tonne of CMSs out there that will do what you’re looking for- just be prepared to spend days implementing them and training your editors how to use them

just signed up, I’m impressed so far. I have multiple clients that will love to be able to update there own news page and blog pages, I’ll try this out on a test site first to see if run into any Apache problems too.

I was wondering if there are any similar CMS tools out there (only modifies certain areas or pages of your website) that handle user accounts?

Was somebody making “whossssssshhhhh shiwwwwwww” noises in the background?

Nice application. I think it’s better than Adobe Contribute.

Doesn’t the joomla cms already do this ? login and frontend editing right on the page, ….redundant, but nice work

Hily
not really, only in the same way that WordPress does: this is simple, lock down editing, not a full CMS, just content editing without access to the backend. As for even mentioning Joomla, you’re giving me coding nightmares

@keke

I’ve heard of a CMS for building social sites in Ruby on Rails if that helps?

http://lovdbyless.com/

I totally agree with keke. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/07/cushycms-beta-launch-free-invites-for-techcrunch-readers/#comment-2142832)

This is really cool, and I think it will be extremely useful for many of my small business website clients. They need super simple, otherwise they won’t use it. This fits the bill!

Guy, one way you could make money on this would be to somehow license the technology for integration with existing web design company control panels, or allow it to skinned or branded somehow. For example, I already have a customer login setup on my site, and if I could have the CushyCMS interface there, with my company logo etc on it, that is a service I would be willing to pay a subscription fee to use.

I was wondering if there are any similar CMS tools out there that handle user accounts?

this is really cool service. just signed up and have already decided to use this for all my websites. this makes updating some minor things really easy and safe. now i do not have to worry about spoiling the entire website due to some minor FTP error

Very nice. Could revolutionize small websites and content updating.

What would be great is after you add a page to edit, it gave you a list of the styles/ids on the page which you could then select to define as editable regions.

When I code out sites I normally have a div with the id ‘content’ and images with ids/classes like ‘logo’ so the information is already there. So rather then adding the ‘cushycms’ to that region, I’d just tell the app which one to use.

It’d eliminate the extra step and clutter of adding additional classes to the html.

Guy/Duncan,

This definitely seems like an incredibly handy tool for a freelance web designer like myself–saves a lot of of back end work I would usually do on my own to set up something similar for a client.

QUESTION - at the end of the video Guy says its ‘free for now’. What are the future plans? How do they plan on making money off of this?–keep it free and embed ads? Or once its grows a user-base, will you require a subscription fee? (and if so, any plans on what that would consist of?)

Thanks for this great tool/post.

-john

this looks BAD ASS!

This looks like a great little tool that could become very useful in the right niche. I’m a bit concerned about the ‘free for now’ comment. I wouldn’t want to start using it and then be told that to continue I have to start paying without knowing in advance how much that cost might be.

I’d also like to host it myself which would likely be a less expensive option.

looks great. will it support SCP additional to FTP? a little howto for wordpress templates and ‘pages’ would be quite useful.

nice app, but as a business venture surely I could get this made by a couple of devs in a week or two?

I caught the “free for now” comment also, which is keeping me from using it on a project.

Obviously cost is very important.

Just a little clarification- what you see now is free and always will be.

I suspect in the future we’ll charge for some new/advanced/premium features though.

Thanks for the comments.

Really good and simple.
I like it and will use it for some pages for free however… I won’t pay for it for personal use as paying for it will need some time and it’s exactly the time to open a page from ftp in an html-editor

Add:
- custom logo and domain
- news engine (people will bug you forever about it)
It’s actually simple a news page and archive pages.
Designer sets how many news must be shown on the news page and how many news must be on each arhive page. Arhive pages are generated automatically with links on them.
the rest goes to archive pages
editor can add a news item
- create a new page from template (people will bug you forever about it)

And it would be a perfect tool for small design studios, freelance designers and blogs good enough to actually pay for it.
I think it would be the best solution to manage simple sites.
As the product mostly targets designers some widgets like voting, contact forms etc. could make it perfect.

This looks like a great CMS, we are currently about to start development of our own CMS system, as we had difficulty finding one that fulfilled our SEO requirements !

Seems like this could be what I’m looking for, thanks for the invites -

I’d love to see the ability to create a page from a template too.

Hmm. Interesting. I’ve been using Joomla! for a year and a half now-and I’ve just fallen in love with it. This CMS seems rather lightweight compared to all of the extensions that Joomla has.

Duncan, you say that joomla gives you coding nightmares…I get wet dreams.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t really want to work with a company that has spent its past years creating systems that get around my sign-up forms, and prevent me from making money.

Why on EARTH would I want to help this company that has worked SO HARD to make sure that I don’t make money?

Hey, TechCrunch, can you post your login info to BugMeNot for your Beta access to their new system?

I would like to see a client login from the website rather than going to CushyCMS. Looks good.

Very nicely done Guy and team! Beautifully simple and elegant. True, not a complete CMS, but it certainly fills a gap. Texty is probably the closest thing in this space I’ve seen.

Nice touch with the FTP integration, file and directory selection, it couldn’t have been smoother.

One suggestion: Bigger message about security when signing up/adding a site. I have multiple vhosts for my account and want to make sure that you are protecting sensitive login data.

-Sasha Pave

For small static sites this looks nice, but def. not for sites that require dynamic content that needs to be archived (which pretty much is how all sites are built these days).

Is this type of CMS sustainable with an SVN workflow? Wouldn’t site updates from SVN just wipe out content changes?

I’m a bit surprised at all the praises being sung here.

The application does appear to be fairly well developed and has a more beautiful interface than any application I’ve developed. But none of this functionality appears to be anything more than the simpler bits and pieces of other recycled CMS features, with the ability to upload via http://FTP.

I’m hopeful that Guy and the other developers of this tool plan to target amateur designers/shops, because anyone with any real CMS needs will find they quickly outgrow this system.

Guy, one quick question: Does the WYSIWYG editor you’re using style itself based upon the stylesheet defined in the page/site? Or will it default to Times New Roman 36pt h1 tags, blue underlined links, etc.?

Great little site, setup up and got it going with my site in less than 5 minutes but there is one problem. If I wanted the title to be editable () I would have to apply the “cushycss” class to and that’s not going to validate on the W3C validator (Yes, I’m an HTML nerd.) Example is here http://www.skyzie.com/cushy/

Any way to get around this?

I’ve played around with CushyCMS and I’m very underwhelmed.

CushyCMS merely copies the file HTML, re-renders it in editable format.

That’s USELESS in semi-dynamic pages with templating. I was really hoping it would run the live page, scrap the dynamic output, THEN re-render the final product with an editing overlay.

This approach seems somewhat ridiculous. Adding a bunch of classes to your markup is going to make for bloated classitis. Not to mention the ridiculous amount of work to set up and maintain…each page’s elements needing classes…that sounds like a nightmare.

If you want a killer solution for a CMS try http://www.squarespace.com

@Josh #58 - looks to me like square spaces isn’t free? it also looks overly complex if i had a 3 page static site and wanted to let my client edit just 1 or 2 fields on the home page….in my opinion cushy is perfect for that and all i have to do is add a class to the 2 or 3 elements i want to make editable…very nice for a guy like me who just uses dreamweaver and doesn’t really wanna edit too much html

From what I’ve seen so far, I’m really liking CushyCMS. Something that I don’t think has been mentioned yet is it’s application as a landing page editor for use in large(r) marketing departments where a web designer can’t continue to make tiny experimental changes to a landing page for PPC, email, etc.

With Cushy, the designer makes and codes the page, and the non-techie marketer can make mods without bugging the designer every hour.

Would also help to manage massive libraries of landing pages, as long as they’re coded properly from the beginning.

All in all, CushyCMS looks like a great tool, with room to grow.

Nice tool. I am working on a similar product that enables news lists, comment forms and file libraries in addition to the ability to edit content regions on pages. It will be set up for resellers (designers) as well. I think there is a large market for this type of product and Cushy is looking good.

I noticed that when i upload an image whilst editing a page, that image gets placed in the root folder of the site defined on my ftp server. Is there any way to change it so any uploaded images would get uploaded to the images folder?

This is a great CMS for the basic websites for small businesses! I’ll definitely be using this CMS for a few sites i run….BIG thumbs up to Guy n his crew!

cmon aussie cmon!! ta! Mic