Easy Website Updates with PageLime
PageLime makes the process of editing static websites laughably easy. There are times when a full CMS like WordPress is far too complicated when only simple edits are required – not to mention the fact that a static template must first be modified accordingly to work with WordPress. Wouldn’t it be easier if your current static website could instantly be integrated with a service, without requiring hours of conversion time? This is where PageLime comes in.
In today’s video tutorial, we’ll go through the process of purchasing a site template on ThemeForest, and then integrating that specific template with PageLime, resulting in a website which is super easy to update…even for your mom.
PageLime is a remote Content Management System that allows you to update the content, images, and documents on your web site without installing any software.
The Screencast
Other Viewing Options
What’s in Store for PageLime?
In the CEO’s own words…
- Repeating Regions – You/Your clients will be able to have regions that you define as repeatable. This will let you dynamically create new buttons in navigation, blog like article additions, etc. This is in testing now, and will roll out across all sites in the next week!
- Multipage Dynamic Content – You will be able to define areas that show up on other places in the website. So when you update them, they update in other places.
- Blog – Drop in simple PageLime managed blog.
- Client Invoicing – We’re building an invoicing feature from withing PageLime that will let you manage your PageLime clients with auto recurring invoices that link to your PageLime account. This basically allows you to setup a subscription model for you clients, and pass the cost of PageLime directly to them. OR charge them more, and make money off of PageLime! This will be a feature in the Business Account Level.
- iPhone App – Manage websites from an iPhone application. This is already designed, just need to go about building it soon. I can send you screenshots if you would like.
- eCommerce – Either a partnership with another team, or build one ourselves that can be dropped in, like the blog.
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Thanks for the screencast.
I fear that Pagelime may still be more complicated for the less savvy end users. While HTML editing is good – it destroys the entire purpose of having this service available in the first place. You’ll feel the pain when your clients screw up the HTML so bad that you have to fix up everything later.
I didn’t see it in the screencast, but another similar service CushyCMS offers the option to label the editable regions with a special text-only class that you can apply to h2 or p tags – this prevents your clients from mucking up the html.
Interesting. Do any of the rest of you feel the same way? Still too complicated for the less savvy users?
I think there’s always someone that finds a way to muck anything up. This one, however seems a bit more complex than others of the top of my head like CushyCMS and LightCMS…
I dont know that it is that complicated to learn, but you do have to put a little time in to learn it. Some people are just not ready to learn it?
Collis mentioned this on twitter: http://buildorlite.com/ I think that it looks like a great tool for developers but also clients/site managers.
I am sure there are a few of these out there.
I agree, many users would simply delete the html tags and write text anyway! Other users may find ways to add inline style thinking they are clever but really making the site super ugly!
When will an inline editing CMS arise? User logs in, sees their site, double clicks any text they want to change. SImple!
Check out Concrete5, it has dead simple inline editing…
JW – sometimes I think you ask questions like this to see if anyone actually investigated the doc rather than mindlessly agreeing with the masses.
It would be nice to have a service that you can use the admin panel to declare the editable regions and then you can create a sub acount for your client, and this account would be limited to only edit what’s editable and nothing else. As simple as replacing text.
Yes, Pagelime is way more complicated than it needs to be. I think they’re trying to stuff too much into it, which makes it less than simple. It’s not bad, but it doesn’t hit the “drop-dead” easy mark that others do.
A good example to compare would be Surreal CMS (http://surrealcms.com). Same concept, but when you get in there you know exactly what’s going on. The interface isn’t jumpy, everything is right where you expect it to be. I’ve tested most of the big names in light CMS poducts, and Surreal CMS is by far my favorite for a good balance of features and ease of use.
Sid what you are describing is the exact way that you integrate PageLime. I should know..I’m Tom from PageLime… LOL
Sid…that is exactly how you integrate PageLime… we have a similar integration to Cushy, but we out class it by many many level of features and usability for clients. Give it a shot, its free… please post your review after actually integrating and checking out our website. Or email me at tom[at]pagelime.com if you have any questions.
Could you make PageLime 100% free please? I think more people would use it and I’d be your friend (or at least tell people I knew you).
THANK YOU!
Hey Sid – You can apply a class called cms-editable-text to any area, and that automatically limits the number of features available in the WYSIWYG. You can also configure and limit the number of WYSIWYG icons in PageLime, it’s a tab in the site settings for each site.
Take a look at the blogpost: http://blog.pagelime.com/2009/10/02/how-to-limit-the-number-of-iconstools-on-the-pagelime-wysiwyg-editor/
Also – Same as with Cushy, if you apply the class to a P or an H1, H2 etc, it will automatically limit the options to basically text only editing.
Hope that helps!
Cool you can turn more complex options off. I guess I didn’t pay enough attention.
Thanks for the response Thomas and Emil. I checked out the free version and it is a great product.
There was a slight bug with » characters on my test page. You might wanna fix that up :)
The best inline editing I have seen is in open source CMS Mysource Mini.. My editors don’t see any html code.. All they do is click editable areas (that I set in my design file) and they edit it using this awesome editor that doesn’t popup a window, it is true and best in context editing IMO.. My editors in love with it.. Oh and the way it tracks changes just like MS Word is awesome.
I love this system! Thanks Jeff! =)
I started using PL for my clients site a couple of months ago. I and my clients LOVE it. The editable ‘bubble’ in the page where the edit can be made is very user-friendly.
The list of services/feature is much more comprehensive than Cushy (which I used to use until PL). I do miss being able to add tags to H1, p etc. as Sid mentioned, whereby that element retains that predefined property but other than than, PL is a fantastic choice for defining content editable areas for clients.
One thing you can do, which is great, is restrict the wysiwyg options so e.g. clients can’t add a table to an area that is really intended for paragraph text, UL, OL etc.
The support from Tom and Emil (I hope they don’t mind me using their names) as some of the best I’ve ever experienced.
Hey Dave,
You can use our personal names all over the place, there are many Tom’s on the internet (*cough* myspace *cough*) there is only one Emil! Shoot me an email. You can totally add editable tags to H1-3, P, etc. We’re about to roll out a huge new feature, and I would love to have you in the beta test!
Looks great some of the features they are working on sound nice as well
Wow, I’ve never tought it would exist something as easy as this. I used to think that you need a lot of PHP knowledge to handle a CMS.
Great screencast!
Although I like to host things myself… I think this looks good and I might use it for a couple projects…
I signed up for Pagelime about 3 months ago it is a good CMS, for someone that does not want to manage files via FTP. Personally I enjoy to manage files on my own.
CutePHP is a good alternative CMS.
Great Tutorial. I think if you were to design with this feature in mind, you would almost have to use PHP to call in the nav and footer so you dont have to pull out your hair changing them on every site.
Jeffrey Way I love each and every screencasts you made, I just love them, i really wanted something like this, it is helpful
Thanks
Yes, you’re right, Jeff! This is really a great system. This should be great for the customers who just want some pages in their website.
Thanks for a great screencast!
Can someone comment on the key differences between cushy and PL? I have been using cushy for a very long time however I am always interested in what else is out there
This seems to sit nicely between CushyCMS and the more advanced full blown CMS available, I just wish they had a per site payment scheme and not a monthly subscription, maybe in the future guys?
It’s tricky, we want to offer one, we really do… but we would have to put somehow throttle usage, as at somepoint our server costs would be overshadowed if someone was doing 3-4 gigs of transfer everymonth on a flat site fee… It will be awhile till resolve this. Most people decide that we are still pretty darn affordable, and are an easy upsell to clients. One of our users makes $150 extra a year on every site on PageLime.
Thanks for your reply Tom, and taking the time to email, you make some good points, I will be seriously considering you for future CMS based projects.
thanks for this great post
dito
Hi Jeff, It’s a very nicely put together product, however I in my experience it’s being wildly optimistic if you you think the average client would be able to use it, simple as it is, sometimes developers forget they are in this environment everyday all day, but to others it is still quite alien. If your client had a techy guy their end then it would fine but then they’d probably be a larger organization and looking for something more sophisticated anyway. I reckon by the time you’d had all the phone calls asking how to do it and what went wrong, it will probably be quicker for you just to make the changes and re ftp the files yourself!
I think…you should give it a try… there is only one button. That publishes. I’ve seen a small clothing boutique run by 55+ yearolds non-tech savvy users on 2005 HP laptops learn the entire system in under 15 minutes. With no problems.
Really interesting idea.
But, what happend with the Homepage, wenn PageLime goes offline? Right ;)
I like the Idea, really. But I think it’s to risky for a client. Good enough for personal projects.
The homepage stay online. The entire perk of PageLime is that you are not hosted with us, everything pushes to you server. If for some reason PageLime did go down (which it never has) your sites are completely safe and remain untouched. You should have piece of mind with us, not concern. The architecture is completely designed to allow for reliability and the ability to leave us at everytime if for some reason you need a new solution. You are not tied to us for site uptime. Period.
sounds great. plans to release this more languages? german?
We’re working on a language builder so anyone can help localize the system. So far we have volunteers for German, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and French.
So yup! Shooting for Mid- January
It is a very impressive system and obviously well put together, but I’m really not a fan of hosted solutions.
For me the best option for giving clients an easily editable website has to be Perch.
PageLime sucks……………….GOD I’m joking! Just wanted to scare you Tom :)
I’ve played around with PageLime before and it works really well and it’s easy!
Thanks for this tuto, I’just start a new website and I was using wordpress but the website is so simple that I will change for PageLime, your just in time with this tuto, thanks for the good job again…
What about Adobe’s Contribute? I had to use it for a client and it worked well for them (as well as myself because it kept them from touching any code). Plus, you can set up in Dreamweaver which sections of the page that the client can edit. They could do anything from edit, add, insert (text, audio, video, images) , etc. to even creating new pages from pages that you, the designer, designated as templates.
Contribute is a desktop app…PageLime has all the features of contribute, but your clients can manage it from a cybercafe on the riviera and still not mess up your site. They can also create pages from templates you design, you can designate pages to be templates, etc.
I like Surreal CMS personally. It’s similar to this and CushyCMS. Both are great options if you’re developing a small static site on the cheap.
When being able to offer this to new clients I often smile, because its almost like being santa clause when i tell them yes you will be able to edit your website to. They all fear that we will do this amazing website design for a lot of money and then they would have to pay each time they have an edit or a tweak they want to do to some content.
–
Thanks and Regards
Noel for Nopun.com
a graphic design studio
It’s nice to see a thorough review of this service. I’ve used CushyCMS in the past and I’ve still had to go back and clean up some formatting issues with text, proliferation of strong tags, etc. Nonetheless, that’s a small price to pay for letting a client manage their own site. Thanks, Jeff.
I can’t deny that there is a real need and big market for CMS products, everybody wants a website that they are able to easily update and for the lowest price possible.
In my personal case I don’t like to use a CMS product because all websites are unique, and there is no way a CMS can contemplate the potential needs for each individual site. I admit the they are AWESOME tools and they save a lot of time and effort not only to the developer but to the client as well.
But the way I see it, and I’ve seen this many times over, you deliver the website to your client, brand new sparkling website and the minute they start messing around with it then you feel that you need to take it out of your own portfolio, because your clients ruin their own website and you don’t want your potential new clients to see what has become of your work and it’s not even your fault.
We see this every day, a lot of people out there think that they can just use MS Word to create a page and save it as HTML and they call that a website.
Let’s be a little more jealous about our trade and make our clients realize that they really need us whether they like it or not.
And if someone wants to take up on design and development, by all means do it the right way and learn as much as you can because we all could use some help.
Sorry about the long post, had a really bad week.
Juan! I know exactly what you are saying BUT to be honest, this can be really easy with a real CMS like Drupal (not WordPress) since Drupal has a great system architecture it allows for managing rights etc really easy. WordPress really has a poor, poor system design, even tho I will get jumped by Fanboys, but it really has one of the worst system designs I’ve ever seen.
With Drupal you could easily just allow them to edit text in a specific way or disallow them from removing certain texts, maximum characters, minimum characters etc etc..
Now I will get wordpress fanboys around my neck, but seriously guys, when you’ve done a lot of agency work or similar you will notice that Wordpres sucks bad.
I don’t like the idea of the hosted “cms”…the inline editing is very nice but I want to have the full control over the script…so a very nice inline editing system is unify from unit interactive or a free version called editease (but this one is not very good documented and the developer is alone, so it’s not that complete as unify)
http://unify.unitinteractive.com/
http://editease.jquerystuff.net/
I think one of the biggest feature that is not being talked about is the “includes” feature … reading a little more about lime, it seems like it supports master templates and page includes.
Obviously I’m yet to see how this functions exactly, but come on, who builds static pages anymore (yes, yes, i’m sure you do), but I hardly do anymore, typically I create a template with basic includes. Most of my sites are PHP pages, usually regular PHP or within a framework like CodeIngiter, however I don’t think lime would work for CodeIgniter since it does URL rewrites and such, I’d be surprised if it did.
Hey Dimas – good point on the includes. I wish more people would check that feature of PageLime out!
We have a way of working with URL-rewriters too, every page has a properties screen, where you can set an FTP target for each page.
So for example, if you’re using Ruby on Rails, and you have a URL that reads like so: /pages/users/, which maps to /app/views/user/index.html.erb. To make this work in PageLime, you would have to go into the properties for that page, and set the FTP target to /app/views/user/index.html.erb, so that PageLime knows where to publish changes.
Unfortunately, you would have to do this for each page :(.
(Alternately, you could use our FTP-XML publishing system, that publishes XML files that you can pull content from via code… but that’s a whole different blog post I’m working in ;)
Nice tutorial. Enjoyed that one!
Wow. Making websites is getting easier and easier… Maybe one day, everyone will be able to make websites, and the web designer role will disappear.
Add SEO support! Editing the meta tags for each page would be sweet!
Hey Montana! We do have full SEO Support since October 2nd! It even does this cool (i think) AJAX Preview of what your page looks like in a Google Search result.
You just have to activate the SEO feature.
We have a blog post about it here:
http://blog.pagelime.com/2009/10/02/new-feature-allow-clients-to-update-seo-fields-using-pagelime/
Cool – Thanks for the post.
Nice Ad.
tnx really useful
Looks good, but I’ve used Unify and being hosted on your own server and a one off payment of $16, it is hard to beat.
+1 for Unify. Installation is easy and the interface is about as simple as it gets.
Jeff – how about a comparison article for the best ‘light’ CMS options out there at present, with a particular focus on ease of use for the client. I’ve been eyeing up Unify too and would be interested to see how it fairs against similar products such as PageLime
IT sounded good just till I got to where it is a hosted service.
That’s not something we do in-house. darn.
I was about to drop the “Unify” name in the hat, but I see there’s already been some discussion in the thread. Haven’t tried it but the price seems to good to be true.
http://www.andyrutledge.com/unify-gush.php
The other thing to set a client up with is something like Contribute, it’s not that easy to support I know for a fact.
Inline editing is just so smooth.
I’ld also like to see an article discussing light CMS options, and breaking them out by hosted services or just what.
Thanks, I hadn’t heard of this one then.
really interesting and useful stuff Jeff, thanks :)
Following you on twitter now, please follow me back @ kaplangdesign
Jeff, this article feels a bit to much like a plug for a comercial product. Keep that sort of stuff on the sidebar
This is damn awesome. Will play with this today.
Great Post Jeffrey!
Pagelime is a great tool to developers, just like any other tool like wordpress or joomla. I think this post is important, because it revealed pagelime to a lot of developers for the first time. It is a very good system, and will save a lot of developers a ton of time. They just need to give it a chance.
Tom, you’ve done a great job with pagelime. It’s a great service and I thank you for making it available to all.
Thanx for the great app.
this is the most application i have ever seen that delivers exactly what anybody is searching for.
great work
wooooow
What do people think of Halogy? Similar, but fully hosted service. They only just launched it and seems user friendly and easy to use. http://www.halogy.com
Thanks Jeffrey – I personally prefer http://get-simple.info though
thanks Jeffery,
interesting app.
Great APP. But, I won’t trust anyone with FTP user password. This would be great if you allow people to download and use it in your own hosting.
Allowing 3rd party services to have control to my site won’t prevent tht some day it will be hacked and all the user/pass info will be stolen.
Again, great tutorial and idea, but not for me nor my clients.
I checked out all the cms mentioned in the comments here. CushyCMS seems to be good, because the client can not touch the html.
But one question:
If I have a layout, which content is not based only on plain text with some and -Tags but for example where text articles are in div-boxes, to provide them with special css styles (for example every article should be in a green box with little background picture)
…is it also possible to ADD content and not just EDIT it?
Seems like PageLime can do it, but I dont want the client allow to touch any html-/div-tags. And CushyCMS seems like can only do EDITING than ADDING.
Would love to hear any recommendations for that:-).
ill gonna use this in my next work, thank you for sharing
I love your screencast and always pay close attention to your suggests, but this time Im a little frustated because it smeals advertising :(
PageLime seems like a nice program. Yet it always makes me laugh but also grind my teeth when somebody say “without any coding knowledge” It is like offering a dentist driller and say “You can be a dentist without any dentist training!”. Sure you can, but it’s going to by ugly.
You DO need at least some coding knowledge to set the system up and to make proper changes. Even when opening the WYSIWYG you cannot rely on what you see because the html behind it may be a mess and you page will degrade with every change you do.
Did you notice that the menu change has be done on every page? I guess adding that to the template may fix it across the site but I doubt it.
You can use includes for nav and repeating areas and just change the include. Though, and if you got a template with the css classes already in it, then you really wouldn’t need to change the code.