What is Reddit's opinion of CouchCMS?

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I'll get down-voted to hell, but I don't care about internet points. If you think WordPress isn't developer friendly, you'll want to stay the fuck away from Drupal. But just try it out, you'll see it's a horribly unintuitive CMS, which more importantly, your client will hate even more.

Also, CouchCMS is very likely what you are looking for, it's actually friendly.

You need to setup some sort of a CMS. Since it sounds like you already have the site built, I'd suggest using something like Perch or Couch CMS as they are pretty easy to integrate into an existing website. I've used Perch in the past and was quite happy with it.

couchCMS, cushyCMS, and Perch are simple drop in solutions that let you define editable regions when you don't need the full power of Wordpress.

There are some great simple CMS style systems out there but my favourite for quick and easy to use websites at present if Couch CMS (http://www.couchcms.com/), Has a really easy to follow tutorial to get you started as well.

A few options:

• GetSimple CMS ( I use this for my website)
• CouchCms
• Cockpit CMS headless API-based cms, the UX/UI is not the best, but it allows you to create custom fields and "collections" of those fields.

I tried (and by tried I mean, read about and got confused by) many other CMS's but the one I managed to implement easily and really like so far (I'll be using it on my personal site) is Couch CMS. Super simple to use, good docs.

Free version requires you to attribute them in the footer, paid version gets rid of that and allows for branded UI

edit: added link

You might be looking for a micro CMS. Try googling for "micro cms", "lightweight cms", or even "flatfile cms" to see your options. Grav looks promising.

The only one of these that I personally have experience with is CouchCMS. It's actually pretty neat! You define which elements on each page should be editable, and CouchCMS takes care of generating the right fields in admin for them. It also allows you to create your own custom admin pages, for more complex data entry procedures.

The downside with these micro-CMS-es is that they are rather specialized: it's harder to find people who have experience with them, and it's harder to find jobs with exclusively micro-CMS experience under your belt. That said, websites made with micro-CMS-es tend to be very easy to modify and maintain.

Another option is to double-down on user roles and permissions. It is possible to e.g. take Drupal and really limit how much each user can do. That way, content editors are not overwhelmed with too many options, and there's a smaller chance that someone will break something major down the line.

Unfortunately the common wisdom ("wordpress all the things") is not the path of least resistance. I'd highly recommend trying out Perch, as it is specifically designed to be added on to existing static markup. In my opinion it requires the least amount of new concepts to be learned in order to make your site editable by clients. They also have great documentation and support. The only downside is that it costs money ($80 per site I believe). For a free option that also has a more simplistic model, try CouchCMS.

The basic idea of a cms, by the way, is you design a generic page template and sort of "punch out holes" in your html where you want user-editable content to go. The CMS software handles the data entry interface, but each system works in a slightly different way. There's also tons more functionality that CMS's can provide, but the essence is always the same -- you design the way a page looks (and its html/css markup), and carve out places where clients can edit the content themselves.

Good luck!

I am doing a simple one page build for a client as well. They want to be able to update sections of the page without having to pay me to do it. I would recommend CouchCMS if it is a PHP based site. Super simple and lightweight.

Have you checked out CouchCMS? I recently spent a couple days trying out different CMS to see which one I'd like to incorporate into my workflow. While the back end user interface could use some styling (I'm sure that's customizable) it is an incredibly simple to use and powerful CMS.

I'd suggest taking a look at Couch CMS - http://www.couchcms.com/ - as it's great if your client only wants to amend a few pages occasionally on their site and really easy to plug into any HTML design or template you may already have.

Here are a couple of CMSes that would do what you require - a simple interface for your client to edit the site. Both require PHP, so not exactly what you're looking for, but a possibility anyway.

http://www.couchcms.com/ (Free)
http://grabaperch.com/ (Paid)

Have you thought about integrating a CMS into your site? A Content Management System will allow authors to write their posts in a simple WYSIWYG interface (similar to Word or an email client), without making any code changes. Here are a couple free ones. Both of them run on the LAMP stack so you can throw them in any standard web hosting without extra configuration.

• Cockpit

• Couch

> that has a blogroll

Considering that a blogroll is just a list of links to other blogs that you like, you can do this with pretty much any CMS in existence. I think you're referring to a blogging system in general though...

Try one of the following:

• October CMS
• Perch
• Couch

> ditching your template and go for some kind of CMS

There are CMSs around that retrofit into existing templates. CouchCMS is one. It has a detailed tutorial where one can implement a full-fledged blog using a static design pretty easily - http://www.couchcms.com/docs/tutorials/

I think CouchCMS is a possible option. Completely free and easy to use, especially if the only thing you want to do is let them add and update pages. Drop in a few PHP tags and you're good to go. The tutorial is a really great introduction. They also have a ton of variables that I've found useful (eg. writing an if check to see what page you're on, and styling the selected navigation item accordingly).

Best thing about it is probably that you don't need to worry about building the site from the group up with a complex CMS in mind like Wordpress. You can take a static site and fairly easily transform it into a basic CMS site.

Alternatively, maybe something like GetSimple? Never used it, but looks similar and seems to have some plugin support.

You can easily implement Fancybox/Lightbox or whatever box. Couch doesn't mandate what HTML/CSS/JS markup you use on the frontend - rather it works by getting retrofitted within your existing static markup.

If you already have a working fancybox (static) sample with you, just use Couch to upload the images (and optionally crop them and create thumbnails). Insert a few Couch tags into the sample markup and you get a dynamic version i.e. which utilizes the images uploaded via the backend.

The docs detail the process in full details - http://www.couchcms.com/docs/concepts/photo-gallery.html

At the bottom of the page mentioned above, you'll find full working code (using slimbox but you can adapt it easily).

For implementations of specifically fancybox, please do a Google search site:couchcms.com/forum fancybox and you should find several threads dealing with it.

A static site, like your example, doesn't really need anything on the back-end -- just a web server and HTML files. That seems to be how the site you linked to is done [except for the shop, which is separate].

That said, it's generally a good idea to make use of a 'content management system', to give your client/friend a simple & safe way to edit things, so that they don't have to call you up for everything. I'd probably use couch CMS in your case.

I've been playing with CouchCMS recently and it's free, lightweight and simple. And its "create a template and let the user make as many pages off it as they like" system sounds ideal for you.

Is this going to be a totally custom site or were you planning on utilizing templates and such? If you were planning on doing the template thing, all you have to do is find a good WordPress theme then plug-n-play.

If you were wanting to do your own thing for design, then I'm not sure WP would be the way to go. You could either find a template that's along the lines of what you were thinking, and then tweak the heck out of CSS, or you can use a starter WP theme like _'s and set everything up exactly as you'd like/need (with a ton of help from the codex, time spent learning, trial and error).

If you're a quick learner and getting down and dirty with WP is something that would interest you, I'd recommend using _'s and going from there, however if you're under tight deadlines or just not really into learning WP, then you'd be best using a pre-built theme, or looking into an option like CouchCMS, which is a little easier to go from totally custom HTML/CSS/JS->CMS.

TLDR; Some good options are WordPress with pre-built theme, using a starter WP theme and customizing, or exploring simpler CMS options like CouchCMS.

Ghost looks actually pretty interesting. Bookmarked.

CMS's like these are exactly what I was looking for. I've tried Joomla and Drupal and the rest of the old guard a few years back, but I've really been out of the loop since and I have no idea what's the latest and greatest when it comes to CMS's.

CouchCMS also looked quite promising, but I'm not sure if it's mature enough yet.

If you're comfy with html and js you could go for couch CMS. It's really easy to work with, and their support is awesome. I just used it with a small business site and I didn't have to learn php php except including snippets (like including header and navigation, and footer). Def worth checking out.

I recently posted a similar question that might be of interest to you, but here are some other suggestions if you don't find it helpful:

I already had content in a WordPress site and wanted a new front end so I used a JSON API plugin to provide RESTful access to my content - no complaints there.

I've also heard great things about Couch CMS which allows more field flexibility out of the box.

Please take a look at CouchCMS - it is meant to be "retro-fitted" within existing static sites.

Another alternative (commercial) could be Perch.

Have a look at Perch and Couch, Both use the concept of editable zones on the page, So they just edit regions like , Title, Introduction Text, Offer etc. Really hard for the client to fuck up and it works really well with Boutique designs, on smaller sites. Lets them make simple changes to the copy without messing with the layout.

Only downside is you have to pay, but its peanuts compared to your bill, and you can download couch and try it out.

CouchCMS definetely seems like something you should take a look at. I've used it a few times before and love it.

You can make a template of one of the HTML pages and then this can be replicated- perhaps a new page for each of the club news. Users do this via a simplistic admin panel.

The documentation offered is extremely useful too - the sample site described in the link probably offers more functionality than you are actually after!

>You're not going to be to "add CMS to a Bootstrap site" because that makes no logical sense.

Actually it'd make perfect sense if you take a look at CouchCMS. What you term as 'backwards' is precisely how one works with it - taking any static site and then adding the CMS into it.

Hola, it sounds like what you have constructed so far is a "static site". One method of implementing an admin interface is to utilize a content management system (called: CMS). If you're currently in the process of developing your skillset, choosing to focus primarily on HTML5 and css, and are looking for relatively simple means of adding and modifying content from an administrative dashboard, then you can try using something like couchCMS. CouchCMS is coded in such a way as to be familiar to HTML, so you don't have to delve deeply into learning a dynamic language. Also, it has a very simple to follow example of page construction, as well as an active forum should you require assistance.

http://www.couchcms.com/

If all you want is a way to make this happen fast and all you need is a place where non-technical people can go and edit content, I think this would be a lot easier on you (and them) than Drupal would be.

> I need to design a fairly large website (maybe 40 pages) using Dreamweaver

40 static pages is a bad idea. Sounds like you got content-driven project going on here, so you should go with CMS aka Content Management System. First you need to build static html page based on your designs, then convert it to CMS page template (usually tweaking/switching PHP snippets over static content). Wordpress is the industry standard, but there are other much more simpler open source platforms, eg. http://monstra.org or http://www.couchcms.com

That would depend on what CMS you were using, planning to use. Typically you would find Wordpress high on the list dependent upon what you're building, but lately I've been playing around with couchCMS locally. Wordpress has a detailed codex and a lot (omg a lot) of online sources for specific questions. CouchCMS has some simple documentation and a pretty good forum for extraneous information and ideas.

edit CouchCMS is incredibly easy to implement so you may want to consider playing around with that, if you're still unsure of what to use.

It can be done w/o an installed CMS. I've heard only good news about SurrealCMS and it's perfect for that and if you can work a subscription, monthly/yearly fee with a few clients the cost it's covered.

Just add a class for the editable content, make a client account and he can modify anything within that editable class.

I will prob implement it on 2 projects I'm working on, since I will be billing the client.

ps: The other would be CouchCMS but required a few more steps and editing php and installing it server side. Making it almost on pair with installing and using a Wordpress as CMS.

I recently used a CMS called http://www.couchcms.com/ it's super minimal and can also easily be integrated into an existing sites codebase, it give a simple editor based on white file type you choose. I know it has a lot more options, but I was able to setup a site with basic editable pages in about 30 minutes.

Edit: forgot to actually include the cms name, has been added to post.

Your honesty is appreciated.

I know it'll be hard, but it's very much something that I want to make happen and will work hard for. Having looked at some of the Wordpress documentation, it seemed mostly like adding PHP/replacing existing code with it which is what gave me hope.

Thanks for the links, too. I'll definitely read up on it this afternoon. My other option is something like using Couch (http://www.couchcms.com/)

They're not tied down to using Wordpress, and something like Couch seems to be a good solution. Have you any experience with something like that?

Thanks for your help

Try couch cms, ... www.couchcms.com ... you define editable regions, very good for custom / boutique sites. See http://www.couchcms.com/docs/tutorials/portfolio-site/about-us.html for a quick intro ... very easy.

Also look at perch cms.

Since you say you don't know any PHP, perhaps CouchCMS would be a perfect fit for you - its tagline states: "Simple Open-Source CMS for designers. No knowledge of PHP required at all".

I've started using CouchCMS for simple sites as it means I can have all the eyecandy and have a simple controllable backend which customers like and find easy to use for updating pages. It does do more than I tend to use it for to be honest but then I usually return to Drupal or Magento when I need e-commerce etc.

http://www.couchcms.com/

Have you looked at http://www.couchcms.com/?

I've been testing around with it on my personal site, so I'm not sure how it is on speed or really any other metrics. It's pretty damn simple to add specific areas that need to be editable, and gives you a clutter-free admin dashboard for your clients. Only the things you add to be editable show up on the dashboard.

Hey there. I'm actually in the process of doing the same. Right now I'm just building the front-end then we're going to add the CMS once it's done. Wordpress is not a bad choice, but for us we wanted an easier CMS to use and update. Because of this I've been leaning on concrete5 and couchcms. Haven't decided which to use yet though.