Back in the summer of last year, I did a little roundup I called The “Light” CMS Trend. Ironically enough, one that wasn’t included was LightCMS. I’ve been checking it out (yes, this is a sponsored review) and it definitely fits the category, with some features that set it apart.

LightCMS is a Light CMS

Really easy updates. That is the whole point of a “light” CMS. They don’t have as many features or as much extensibility as a “full” CMS (e.g. WordPress), but they do make the job of editing content on a site more intuitive, especially for less technology-inclined clients.

For example, to log in to your site, you append /login to the URL, and you’ll be presented with a login screen directly in the skin of your site.

Any client can appreciate that.

Some of what LightCMS does is common to many CMSs. It is for managing content and building websites. It lets clients do this themselves (literally every single client I’ve had in the past many years has wanted this, whether they actually do it or not). There are users. There are templates. Some features of LightCMS are unique to it, which I’ll cover later.

Editing

The most important part, the editing of content, is a nice clean process. Content is kept on the page in modules. The modules can be drag ‘n dropped around (or manually moved) as well as of course editing and deleted.

Drag and drop modules

Module menu

I enjoy how clean and polished all of this is. There is a lot of detail in an app with this many features and options, and it easily could have been half-assed.

Differentiation

Hosted

A common approach to the “light CMS” thing is to either give the CMS access to your site via FTP credentials, or put files on your server which do the job of editing. Either way, it’s your server. That can be a good thing, I know a lot of times I like having things under my control a lot of times. However, none of them are free, so it’s an expense you have on top of what you already pay for hosting. LightCMS is fully hosted.

They have a bunch of plans (literally 6) from free to a premier $99/month plan. The plans vary in number of users who can access the account, number of pages you can control, and the storage.

Some of the pricing plans

Fully hosted means that, by default, your site lives at a subdomain on lightcms, for example: http://yourwebsite.publishpath.com/. That may work for you, but probably not. Not very professional and all. You can easily use your own domain name though, with a simple CNAME change.

Fully hosted also means no manual upgrading. Not to mention customer support.

FTP

Even with the hosting, and the otherwise kind of clean/sanitized environment, you can get direct FTP access. Nice.

Widgetry

Another unique feature is how they give you functional bits you can add to pages as modules (I think they call them “elements”) just like your own custom ones. For example, a blog element, calendar element, a robust form builders, photo gallery, donations buttons, etc.

Reselling

They have kind of a white label option, where you can have your clients pay for the service, and you earn money from that. They charge $19/month, and you can set the price at whatever you want (you earn whatever on top of 19 you charge). Might be nice for some folks, but probably not something I would use. I prefer billing my own clients, so I’ll just pay for it and mark it up in my own invoices, but hey whatever works.

Your own designs

It should go without saying, but you can use your own designs with this. Basically you create a template with HTML files in a specific naming convention (Home.html, Inside.html, Admin.html, etc). Inside those templates you declare editable regions with “tokens” like this:

<$region$> <$/region$>

Once you got it all together, you just zip it up and upload it and your new design will be available as a template.

Try it

I think it’s a pretty decent little system. Go check out their Why LightCMS? page (and the tour) for a more thorough overview of what it does than what I presented.

Alright so after one missed deadline, the results are here! You can browse all the scores and see peoples entries on the CSS Off results page.

Winners

Of course all these people did a great job. For their benefit, we’re just going to nitpick offer a little constructive criticism.

1^st Place – Steven Schrab – View entry

Notes: Take it a little easier on the image compression. CSS image replacement on title looked good, but would be impractical.

2^nd Place – Edd Sowden – View entry

Notes: IE 8 could have used some fallback alpha transparency support. IE 6 had the raw stylesheet, which usually is awesome, but would have been good to support for this contest.

3^rd Place – Mustafa Quilon – View entry

Notes: Would have preferred a Helvetica at the top of the font stack over Gill Sans. Missed the shadows on the footer lines as they go under the article page.

4^th Place – Pam Griffith – View entry

Notes: The font-stretch property caused some big differences in the header type between WebKit and Gecko.

These winners have been contacted, who will then in turn select the winning commenters on the original post. Once they have been selected, those people will be contacted and then prize selecting will begin.

As a whole

Everyone who entered should pat themselves on the back. As a whole everyone did a great job and should be proud. It was a for a good cause and good practice. I just mention this because I’m sure there will be some of you who are unhappy with their score. Don’t take it too seriously…

Judging

Entries were judged by myself and Doug Neiner. We each judged different alternating parts of each entry. You probably know me. Here is Doug:

Doug is a designer, developer, and owner of Pixel Graphic Design Studio. He is CTO of Fuel and blogger at Fuel Your Coding. He also has a personal website.

We judged on the following 100 point scale:

Specific Problem Areas

We were fairly lenient on fonts when it came to all the Helvetica Neue business. PC’s don’t come with that font, so if you used image replacement in the header, that was fine. Using image replacement for the article title isn’t a good idea though, so that was taken off for. I would have rather seen a wrong font than something that unflexible.

After all that judging, these are the things that tripped people up the most:

1. Line Height

There was text all over this mockup, with a variety of line-heights. This was often overlooked or misjudged. Line height is crucial for displaying text that feels good to read.

2. Subtle Shadows

As the three little lines went under the article box, there was a subtle shadow there.

3. Grid

The legs of the clock lined up nicely with the edges of the three photo boxes in the mockup. Many designs didn’t get that right. If the clock was placed in a fluid width manner yet lined up when the window size was about the size of the mockup, that was acceptable.

4. Web text

The text in the three “quote” boxes at the bottom was Georgia in three different colors. That definitely should have been web text sitting on top of those boxes, not an image, even if it was image replacement or had proper ALT text. Web text renders better, is easier to update, is selectable, etc.

Interesting Entries

None of these entries were winners, but they all did interesting stuff, check it out!

#103 – Fixed position footer and the content slides underneath it.
#117 – View source =)
#104 – One of the examples with animations for the arms of the clock
#58 – Total reinvention of the design
#127 – Maybe the only attempt at fixed positioning the clock
#11 – Used the MagicLine

Wrap up

It has been a long road! The important lesson we learned from putting on the event is that it’s a lot more work that the original idea seemed to be. But we got through it! Next time we’ll be more upfront about the timeframe and have the process more ironed out. Some sponsors will be good to to keep the thing cost neutral for everyone.

If you missed it up top, the results are here.

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