I’ve been using Surreal CMS and want to recommend it:
the documentation is comprehensive
the support is excellent
nice, clean UI
great control over what the client can and can not do in the rich text editor
easy to integrate
set up is a doodle (it’s cloud based, so no installing or set up)
comes with a customisable user manual for the client
All round excellent
I did find that FW was doing strange things to my PHP include files, so in the end I hand coded the site. I’ve been putting off hand coding for years, but it’s not as difficult as I had feared and actually enjoyed it.
I agree, it does have a nice UI but the downside for me is that it’s not self-hosted. There are so many other free or low cost self-hosted CMS that I can’t justify paying monthly, no matter how reasonably priced.
I like the fact that it is not self-hosted - nothing to install or update - keeps it very simple.
For the standard monthly fee you can use the CMS on up to five websites, so that’s not too bad. And being a paid for service you get good support.
There is one tricky bit. The editable content isn’t stored in a database. It is directly inserted into the html. This means you can’t round trip with FW, because FW will over-write the html pages (including all the clients text). The work around is to work on the files in FW and only upload the CSS files via an ftp uploader app or hand code.
I’m beginning to think that I’ll use FW as a tool to quickly mock-up sites and then once the design is signed off I’ll hand code.
I thinking when you go down the CMS route you’ll probably hit the wall of having to cater for special features like adding a blog, customer login etc. I’m not sure how well this CMS will stand up compared to something like Perch which 6 months down the line it would be paid for compared with Surreal.
If your client sites keep simple, then fair enough. Mine never do.
David Owen
On 29 Oct 2013, at 17:11, Todd email@hidden wrote:
but the downside for me is that it’s not self-hosted. There are so many other free or low cost self-hosted CMS that I can’t justify paying monthly, no matter how reasonably priced.
I agree. The monthly paid thing (for hosting) is indeed nothing to sell to my client structure cause they already pay for their host.
Regarding the functions of a CMS I’m more and more on the modular way of thinking. Assumed, the CMS has NO blog function what about using specific (or alternative) blogging platforms? I mean such as blogger (or even tumblr) - which would honestly embed the “blogs” into a social structure?
Newsletter? There is mail chimp. And much more is thinkable. It would be cool to open a list with a collection of the “must-have” features for lightweight client-maintained pages.
The downside for sure is, that the client has to jump from backend to backend - no “one and only” tool. But honestly:
Compared what a client initially wanted to do and what they do in real - I’m more and more convinced that the CMS is mostly overthought - probably.
I thinking when you go down the CMS route you’ll probably hit the wall of having to cater for special features like adding a blog, customer login etc. I’m not sure how well this CMS will stand up compared to something like Perch which 6 months down the line it would be paid for compared with Surreal.
I think Perch is catering for more sophisticated / knowledgeable designers and developers. I was put off by the steeper learning curve and an email I had from them saying “we assume that Perch users are comfortable writing HTML and CSS by hand”.
The CMSs I compare Surreal to are WebYep, PageLime and Pulse etc. My client needed to add pages himself, so WebYep and Pulse aren’t suitable and personally I don’t like UI of PageLime.