An Overview of CushyCMS and the InnerFade Plugin

It's screencast time! This week, I thought I'd change things up just a bit. Today, I'll be going over two things. First, we'll take a look at how easy it is to edit static sites using the free service, CushyCMS. Next, we'll create a nice slideshow by using a jQuery plugin called "innerFade". Enjoy!

Cushy CMS

Cushy is a content management system that will allow your clients to easily edit portions of their sites that you designate. While many clients will absolutely benefit from a powerful platform like Wordpress, others will find it to be bloated and too heavy for their needs.

Consider an older man who wants a presence on the web - at the suggestion of one of his Sunday checkers buddies. Trying to teach a person like this how to use Wordpress will prove to be extremely difficult, and unnecessary. Cushy will solve this.

Your client will be able to edit his or her site quickly and easily using this service. How is this possible? You only need to add a class to your document.

The Mark-up

The first step is to specify what part of your document should be editable. When you determine this, add a class of "cushycms" to the parent element.

<div class="cushycms">
<p>
Here is the information that can be edited by my client.
</p>

How Does it Work?

Cushy is a hosted service. When you sign up for a free account, you'll need to input your ftp information for your chosen site. Subsequently, when you, or your client update a section, the file will be saved and transferred over to your server - thus overwriting the current version of the file.

The Conclusion

Many will argue that Cushy CMS is far too weak to be taken seriously. In some ways, they are absolutely correct. However, they're completely missing the objective of the service. Cushy is in no way trying to replace Wordpress. Instead, it's offering a wonderful and easy to use service for your clients. You could even consider charging your clients for this service. I personally have!

The obvious downside is that it's not open source. I'd love to be able to self host and brand every inch myself. While you can purchase a premium plan for about $25 US dollars a month, it would still be nice to dig your teeth into the code, so to speak.

The screencast details each step listed above. As a bonus, it also details a nice jQuery plugin called "innerFade".

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