text editor (quasi CMS)

[j-z]

I'm wondering if anyone knows of an editor that can run on the HN servers (perhaps PHP based?) for easy text editing for clients? The ability to add photos would be nice, but not necessary.

I'm not looking for a full CMS solution like Joomla or Drupal. I'd just like to embed some code into my HTML pages that denotes an area as editable. The functionality of a product like CushyCMS is what I'm after (or the idea of Editable regions in Adobe Contribute). Client would have a login that would show them a list of the editable pages on their site. From there they click the page they want to edit. They then see the text, can make changes, and click Publish.

[NexDog]

Good luck with finding something that simple. Most solutions come as full blown CMS systems. But if it's PHP based I'm sure you'll have no problem getting it to work on our servers.

[j-z]

I've stopped looking. I will use CushyCMS for now and hope one day there will be something I can run on the server. Thanks for your reply. I just wanted to be sure I wasn't missing something obvious.

[MikeMann]

The closest I've come to something simple (not a full blown CMS) was CMS Made Simple. Haven't used it in quite some time though.

[j-z]

Mike. Thanks for the link.

[TraceyS]

Late to the party, but for non-savvy clients who just want to update their content I'm loving Get Simple. It's XML-based so doesn't even need a database, and it's a breeze to design for.

It allows file/image uploads, and stores backups of pages - their philosophy is that nobody reads warnings/alerts, so make everything 'undoable'.

[j-z]

Hi Tracey. Late but worth the wait. That's an interesting product, Get Simple. Looks like it would be at least as customizable as a Wordpress template. Not nearly as easy as CushyCMS but more powerful. It's intriguing. And looks to be free. Thanks for the link. Are you running this on a Host Nexus server?

[TraceyS]

j-z - sure am running this here at HN, it's working beautifully too.

The templates are easy, as - like WordPress - you design your structure and then it's just a matter of dropping the appropriate PHP calls wherever they're needed.

There's a (small) community developing plugins too, so it seems to be growing in popularity.

I was looking at alternatives like you were when I found it - all the good ones seemed to require hosting on external servers, with added expense if you wanted to self-host (assuming you could at all). So far so good, and it's free.

For small CMS solutions, there's also Perch, if you don't mind a small purchase (no pun intended) which you can just charge your clients for development costs if you prefer. Perch is self-hosted, but you have to buy a £35 licence each time you create a site.

Haven't used Perch as yet, was quite close to implementing it for a client but came across Get Simple and went with that instead.