CMS Jam Content Management Systems: News and Resources

Although I wouldn’t recommend using this type of “ultra-light” CMS for most people, I can see using it for a few. If you already have a small site that you occasionally update by changing the files, and then ftp’ing the changes up to your server, you may have been wishing for a quick way to edit just the text without dealing with FTP. There are a few CMS’s that are designed to that - and only that - so you may want to check them out.

Lil’ CMS

The first that I’ll mention is Lil’ CMS. As you’ll see from the one-page site, there’s not much to this CMS. All you’re really getting is a simple little text file editor, and instructions on how to create includes in your existing web pages so that the file editor can access those “editable areas”. It’s easy, but very, very basic. Still…that might be exactly what you want.

CushyCMS

The next is a new system that is pretty intriguing in the way it works. CushyCMS allows you to add a CSS class to the areas on a page that you want to be editable via the system. So, if you want a paragraph of text to be editable, you simply wrap a div tag around it and give it a the class=”cushycms” attribute. Do that for every editable section of each page, and from then on, you can edit the text of those pages. The easiest way to grasp the concept behind CushyCMS is to watch the quick video tutorial they have on their home page entitled How To Edit A Site With CushyCMS (in under 3 minutes).

The Winner?

CushyCMS is a bit more sophisticated than Lil’ CMS, earning it usability points, but Lil’ CMS isn’t dependent upon an outside source, so it has a slight advantage there, in that your solution won’t disappear if the outside source goes under. Either may be the right choice for the user who wants only the most basic of editing choices, at the right price (free). Keep in mind, however, that neither offers any extras such as the ability to add pages, sections, menus, features, etc. They do one thing and one thing only - provide you with the means to edit blocks of content on already existing pages, directly from your browser - and that makes each of them a winner for this “ultra-light” CMS category.