ImpressPages Web CMS: Say Goodbye to the Cut and Paste Nightmare

By Geoff Spick | Published Jul 29, 2010 Comments

Open source Web CMS, ImpressPages (news, site), has created a tool to preserve the formatting of your words but get rid of the underlying code that can screw up your pages when cutting and pasting.

Our Format Hell

Anyone using CMS systems, HTML tools or other web services will be familiar with the evil of cutting and pasting some text and having a whole load of odd formatting errors, quirky characters and other disasters appear on the published page.

When we took a look at ImpressPages' open source CMS last year, it was doing a lot of good work on the ease of use side, but there wasn't much to the PHP-powered CMS itself. It has since come a long way, coming out of beta back in May and now up to version 1.0.6. By throwing features like smart cut and paste in, it should be winning over a lot of fans.

The Cut and Paste Dream

The time-saving cut and paste feature helps you keep the format of the text you copied, but gets rid of the CSS or HTML code under the hood. So, you get to keep your bold, italic, underlining, links, lists, paragraphs and line breaks, but they will be pasted over as valid styles for your page.

Another addition to this update is support for the <br> tag in widgets plus a number of bug fixes and clean-ups.

The rest of the package comes with an SEO module, TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor, plug-in support, translation tools and a collection of free themes and plug-ins.

You can take a demo of both the front and back end here, and enjoy the drag and drop interface.