Cushy CMS - Is it too light?

Has anyone tried this yet?

[beethoven]

Has anyone taken CushyCMS for a spin? If you're not familiar with it, it is a very lightweight CMS that allows you to add CSS classes to your HTML tags to make any element editable with a RTE. Here are some initial thoughts I have on it:

PROS:
-Stays completely out of the way of the design
-It's free
-It's very easy to set up
-Produces standards compliant, search engine friendly content

CONS:
-Lacks push button “page creation” features
-Lacks Menu management
-No support if problems arise
-Lack of user management?

Thoughts? Are there similar offerings out there with perhaps a few more features? Thanks.

-beethoven

[edited by: ergophobe at 6:17 pm (utc) on April 23, 2008]
[edit reason] URL removed [/edit]

[ergophobe]

[disclaimer: my comments about Cushy are based just on the video, not on actual use]

You sucked me into watching their video. It's a cool concept, and in some ways might be easier for my friend who knows nothing about the web (or computers even) but wants a website. Wordpress is proving to be a challenge to him.

That said, I'm too much of a control freak. The idea that I would build a site and the admin interface is hosted on some other site is not a comfortable idea for me.

I think you could get a similar result with drupal and the Content Construction Kit or ModX and template variables. With ModX it would be pretty similar, but I don't know enough about how permissions work. But the concept - templates, template variables - is similar. If you can define roles that can edit the page, but not the template, then you're there.

With drupal, the permissions part is there, but I modifying the template for every single page (which Cushy can do provided you are a "designer") isn't that easy.

The thing about drupal (and ModX I think) is that you could have this (template access with full permission; template variables with other user roles) *and* the client could add new, similar pages and (depending on permissions) have access to the menu system (or leave it automated). With Cushy, you need a designer to add a page and a content editor to edit and, ultimately, it's not really based on templates, but a collection of pages.

The one thing I see, too, is somewhat of a management hassle. Without some version control, every time you as the developer want to work on the site, you would need to lock out the client, download the site to your computer, use Dreamweaver or whatever you're using to manage templating and make any sitewide changes, then reupload the whole site. I could be wrong about that, but that's how it looks to me.

[beethoven]

Thanks ergophobe. Good points. I've also been looking at Light CMS as a more robust alternative. I just really don't want to get stuck with Joomla (I hate it and my management hates it). I'll check out ModX. Thanks again.

[ergophobe]

It all depends on need, but Cushy is just too light for most things I would want to do (but that's just me). I think there's a niche for a stripped-down, very fast, very secure CMS that doesn't do much, but does it well.

Of course, the "problem" with all the open source CMS is they end up trying to be all things to all people (or all people willing to write a module) so feature creep is persistent and at a certain point, it's nuclear bomb when what you need is a good hammer.