Early yesterday morning I got a beta account for the upcoming release of CushyCMS, a new content management system developed by the BugMeNot people. By their own statement CushyCMS is a new type of content management service that aims to simplify online content editing rather than replace juggernauts likes WordPress and Joomla.

What CuhsyCMS is Not
If you want to understand CushyCMS you must first learn what it’s not. CushyCMS is not a self hosted script or service. All editing functions are carried out through the CushyCMS site. Additionally, CushyCMS is not generally for creating content, rather, it’s intended more for replacing content. While these two things may seem like big drawbacks in todays dynamic content world, there are a few things CushyCMS does well.

What Cushy Is
CushyCMS is very clean and very easy to figure out. Anyone with general Internet knowledge should be able to figure out what to do on the site . The technology powering the site also works very well. In my tests I was able to add a site, setup a page for editing, add three editors and populate my tagged <div>s and <p>s with content in under 10 minutes. CushyCMS is quick, clean and efficient. But, is it useful?

Is It Useful?
There were a couple of applications released years ago that did something similar to this. I think Contribute by Macromedia (now Adobe) was probably the most popular. I was never really impressed with this kind of “replaceable text block” type system back then and in todays SEO, SEM and RSS driven web space it makes even less sense. While CushyCMS is nice and more than delivers on its promise of simplicity I have a few major concerns that will prevent me from using very often if ever.

Problems

1. Not under my control. Because this service is hosted elsewhere my ability to edit a web site is dependent on someone else’s network.

2. Not brand-able. If I were to send a client to Cushy they would see the cushy logo, the cushy colors and the cushy way of doing things. There is no way for me to brand cushy for my business.

3. Your content is not archived. This is a big one for me. So big in fact I’m sure I must be missing something. When you change your content with CushyCMS you’re essentially deleting old content to make room for new. There is no archiving of old information, no built in syndication of the changes and no way to link old content. Say goodbye to your keywords.

4.Your files will become out of sync. When you update a site with CushyCMS you are actually changing the file. The content is on page not in a database. This can create the following problematic situation: Let’s say I change my site’s content using CuhsyCMS. I then notice something else non-cushy enabled needs to be changed. I make the changes and upload the new file. The new file did’nt have the recently updated Cushy content so those cushy content changes are now overwritten. Sure, I could just try and remember to always download the file before working on it but I know I will forget a majority of the time. Add in multiple developers, content managers and clients and it could be a real mess. CushyCMS does have version tracking but I was unable to get that feature to work with my tests. It did save my versions but they were all empty.

Conclusion
When I got the email about CuhsyCMS I was really looking forward to a simple, slimmed down, super quick content editor. While Cushy does deliver on these aspects I think my uninformed expectations left me a little disappointed with the actual service. I’m most defintely not saying CushyCMS isn’t great, I’m just saying it’s not really what I was in the mood for.

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