CushyCMS is a very simple, nice idea for allowing users to edit content on their website without giving them access to the templates. It doesn’t allow changes to mark-up or style sheets, only titles, images and blocks of copy.
It requires that the site admin marks up the blocks that will be editable by adding class=“cushycms” to their containing elements; the web-based application will then automatically find each marked element in the pages you assign to it and open a text area (with or without WYSIWYG editor) allowing the user to edit.
In its current state it wouldn’t be suitable for sites with a lot of pages, but if you run a small, brochure-type site for a customer who wanted to make occasional updates, this could be a better solution in some cases than installing a full database-powered CMS.
I’d prefer it to have a better WYSIWYG editor, and it would be more useful if the interface could be branded and hosted on your own server. However, the creators are open to feedback and these ideas and many others have been suggested already.
While it may not (yet?) be the answer to all your content management requirements, CushyCMS is a neat, clever little app that would be useful for small businesses or for small clients. It’s currently in Private Beta only, but if you watch the introductory video closely, that won’t be a barrier to entry.
As just about everyone in the development community must know by now, Microsoft released a first Beta of IE8 today. I’ve been testing it for the last hour or so, and here are some notes I’ve made — the first of which is that this is really more of an Alpha than a Beta; there are a lot of bugs and errant behaviours.
One of the first things I noticed was that the browser comes with a limited set of development tools built in. They’re not well integrated, they’re not very extensive, and they’re not easy to use; but they’re there.
I’ve been playing with the Firefox 3 nightlies for quite a while now so the first beta release didn’t really hold any great surprises for me. The updated rendering engine is fast and clean, and it’s got lots of nice new features which make it a treat to use. Most of my favourite new features are already in Opera 9.5, however; and one that isn’t could really do with the Opera touch.
I’m writing this post using the first Alpha of Opera 9.5, which was released today — just in time for me to play with it a little before I go on holiday! I won’t have time to do an in-depth study of it just yet, so here are my initial thoughts.
I’ve used Bloglines for a long time to organise the many (too many?) feeds I read daily. I’ve always been happy with it, resisting the charms of new kids on the block such as Google Reader, but recently there’ve been some changes I find have taken the service a few steps backwards.
For no particular reason other than idle curiosity, I made a demo of a broken neon sign, using CSS Animations (you’ll need Firefox 5, Safari or Chrome to see it). It doesn’t degrade well at the moment, the root cause of which is down to what I think is a bug in Firefox’s implementation — I’ll need to confirm that.
One quick learning from making this: it would be really useful to have CSS Mixins when using a lot of repetitive keyframes, as I do in this animation. The W3C seem to be quite against them, however.
[#] 3 Comments