MagicEdit CMS

"Sometimes the simplest things to do are the hardest things to accomplish."

As a web designer, you should be able to create a custom site with a content management system (CMS) and not be tied to a limited set of templates or plug-ins, especially those that take long hours for you to implement and your customers to learn. Why should you sacrifice your vision for a client's site just so you can shoehorn in somebody else's idea of a working CMS?

This was the approach we took when developing MagicEdit, our simple-yet-robust CMS.

When building websites that are designed to be managed by non-designers, here are a few rules of thumb:

1. Don't send the content managers off of their site to manage content

   What, to change this page, I go over to this other site (that looks nothing like my site), drill down three levels, find some other page, edit the text (if you're lucky), submit it, then go back to the original page and refresh it to see what happened?

   And how is this better than calling you up to change my site?

2. The content managers should only manage the actual content, not change the look and feel (that's your job!)

   Face it, most people don't have the knack for design. Just because you can change the font doesn't mean you should.

   MagicEdit gives all of the control over precisely what can be edited, and how it is edited, to the person best qualified for it: the web designer. Best of all, there's no PHP, no JavaScript, no SQL queries, no crazy CMS systems. It's as simple as adding a couple of HTML tags. What could be easier?

3. Make the system as simple as possible

   A vast array of websites out there don't need a million bells and whistles. But in order to get a simple feature like the ability to change the text on a page you need to redesign your whole site in a different way.

   MagicEdit lets you take your site, as-is, and add dynamic editing to it. Now that's simple.

MagicEdit lives on the client's site- no page redirects- and works by replacing default text with the client's own updates. The client never touches the code (which keeps them from changing the styles) and you don't have to manage their content. While MagicEdit is obviously not the only CMS solution that lives on the client's site, it is certainly the simplest. All it takes is some tags around the updatable content and you've already installed its most basic functionality.

Other features include image replacement, simultaneous updates across multiple pages, and the ability to repeat areas and create new ones (think news items, blog articles, even new pages).