I’m looking for an extremely easy to use CMS similar to Cushy CMS. I have a few clients who are not at all tech savvy and things like Joomla, Drupal or even WordPress freak them out. I love how easy the control panel is of Cushy CMS.
However, there are problems with Cushy CMS:
The professional version, which is required for custom branding, is pretty steep at $28/month
I don’t like the idea of having my CMS hosted elsewhere. I understand the website files are on my server but I’d like the admin side on my server as well
I love the simple way they allow you to template your website. It involves just adding a class to each element you’d like editable. I understand that this isn’t a real “template” but it’s super easy to get setup which allows me to roll a product like this out very quickly and cost effectively.
Does anyone know of a product like Cushy CMS that will address my two bulleted concerns listed above?
Actually, Hyper; CushyCMS is easily the best I’ve found so far, and that’s after looking for exactly this for a long time.
The only other closest thing I’ve found like this is for music sites. It’s called STASH (http://www.nicestash.com/) – but STASH is specifically designed, as I said, for music sites. However, I’m sure it can be tweaked, and it is open source.
Stash looks pretty neat but I think it would take a ton of tweaking. I actually found another one, www.silverstripe.com which works in a similar way. It’s a bit more complex than Cushy CMS but the templating is super easy.
Yeah, I could imagine Stash would take a fair bit of tweaking to move it over from a music-based CMS. I’d be interested to see what you come up with if you end up programming your own, though. I’ll have to check silverstripe out, as well -
Take a look at Concrete5. It’s an open-source CMS you install on your own server (they also offer a hosted option). It’s similar to Cushy CMS in the way you edit pages and create templates. Creating a template is super easy – take any existing HTML or PHP design and just add single lines of code everywhere you want to make something editable. Editing a site is easy too – login, browse to the page, and hit edit. It supports a bunch of add-on “modules” and “blocks”, and it’s easy to create your own. It’s important to note that C5 is far more complex than cushy and is geared more towards developers.
I recently created an open source project as a free alternative to cushy cms. It’s basically the same concept and features but without any price attached to it.
mechedit dot com is the website if you want to check it out. This thread is getting a bit old but thought it would be good to note it.
Sometimes you do just have to pay to play and free isn’t always the best option.
The problem with CushyCMS is that you don’t get anywhere near enough bang for you buck. You should try out PageLime (pagelime.com). It is really fantastic. It has a similiar archetecture integration as CushyCMS, and still has the off site issue, you get a much more professional and presentable interface, as well as image and page management, and administration options. I’ve been using it for about 2 months and my clients absolutely love it.
It’s free right now, my bet is they will price it to undercut Cushy in the future anyway, so might be worth getting in now early
You can give Orbis CMS a go. It basically has everything Cushy has (stylish interface, simplicity, no learning curve) but is self-hosted and free. Check it out at: novo-ws.com/orbis-cms
Please note that our product Alpha Absorber allows you to automatically convert your existing site so it will compatible with CushyCMS. Please find the Alpha Absorber product in Google and let me know if you have any comments or questions.
If installing a db is possible I think the best option is Perch, the top things I like in it are that it is brandable and also has simple image uploading built in
