How does Cushy CMS do it?

[scottwhittaker]

Hi

I just came across CushyCMS which seems like a nice simple CMS for basic sites and for those who havent seen it, it basically allows web masters to define editable parts of a web page by assigning a class="cushyCMS" attribute to any specific <P> or <DIV> tag. Assigned editors can then login and change the content. I like it because its so simple. Most other CMS I come across are so involved and complicated its unreal.

 

Basically I was just wondering how it pulls the content of a page out and rewrites it back to the page?

 

I thought of a way of doing it myself but it involves creating a template with a content area and then allowing them to edit a simple content page and then create a HTML page by combining the two but obviously CushyCMS doesnt work this way as it edits the pages from any server its provided with FTP details of.

 

Another way I thought of was to somehow read the entire page and find any element with a cushyCMS class assigned to it and display it for editing purposes then re write the page back to the server overwiting the original but I'm not sure on how to best do the middles part of this (searching for and pulling out full <DIV>'s and <P>'s etc with a relevant class value) whilst remembering where to insert them back into the page.

 

Anyone got any thoughts as to what the best way of doing this is or how I can do the second idea above?

 

Thanks for any input!

Scott

[wildteen88]

It most probably uses AJAX (javascript XMLHttpRequest Object).

 

You'll find may examples all over the net. Search google for Ajax.

[aksival]

Cushy uses the same mechanism as Surreal CMS and any other light content management system out there: FTP

 

[*]Enter FTP information into CMS

[*]CMS downloads page from server via FTP

[*]CMS parses HTML file

[*]CMS provides way to edit assigned content regions

[*]CMS publishes page back to server via FTP

 

It's a simple concept, but not nearly as simple to do programmatically