Quick Take Review: Clover Web Content Management

Their website says it all: Clover CMS is a simple web content management system. Designed to provide basic content management functionality, the intent is to bring content management capabilities to organizations with only minimum requirements and a minimum of appetite for learning new technology.

What Clover Content offers is a straightforward way to create content for your website in a hosted environment, delivered to your website via two simple lines of code.

With this Quick Take Review (see more quick take CMS reviews), we show you exactly what Clover Content CMS is and isn't. Come take a closer look.

Overview

Clover Content CMS is a hosted (SaaS) content management solution. It provides the basic content management capabilities that enable an organization to easily create and modify content for a website.

Officially launched on December 1, 2008, the content management system currently supports over a dozen websites and is growing every day.

CMS Basics

Company and Product History

Clover Content is owned by Don Fitzsimmons of Factor Three Software. The decision to develop this simple CMS stemmed from an experience Don had in late 2007 trying to help a friend implement content management on their hosted website.

What Don realized is that there are people and organizations out there that need basic content management that is simple to use and can be easily implemented on an existing website.

That's what Clover Content is, the back-end content management functionality that feeds content to websites built on any technology and hosted anywhere.

Marketing and Pricing

There are two primary markets for Clover Content. The first is web design or web development agencies who build websites for other people. Clover Content provides them with pre-built content management functionality that is easy to set up and even easier to modify with their own designs. This enables the design company to focus on their strengths — the website's user interface and user interactions.

The second market is the small to mid-size business who want basic web content management capabilities for their existing site or for new micro-sites.

Currently, the company has focused on the local market in Arizona, building awareness and establish credibility near homebase.

Pricing

Pricing is packaged based with the ability to customize based on individual needs. The packages are as follows:

All packages provide a 30-day risk free evaluation period. 

It's important to clearly point out that this pricing is for the back-end content management administration capability and does not include the actual website the content is fed into. The website is the responsibility of the organization.

Key Features and Ratings

Core Technology

Clover Content is built on the latest Microsoft technologies. The content administration website is built using ASP.NET and has a SQL Server database to hold the content.

Content is delivered to a website via a SOAP-based web services API.

The entire solution leverages Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), one of Microsoft's latest programming interfaces in the .Net Framework 3.0.

Diagram: Clover CMS Architecture

This is a service-oriented architecture model based on web services. There is no software to install on your servers or host provider.

To get content into your website from the Clover Content Management System, you simply place two lines of code on your web page. The code snippet comes in three languages: PHP, ASP.NET and JavaScript. So even though the content management system is built on Microsoft technologies, your website does not have to be.

Set-up of the code snippets on the website is the responsibility of the organization and since the primary market is web design or web development companies it should not be a stretch to think that they could implement the code snippets fairly easily.

In cases where a client isn't comfortable implementing the code, Clover Content will do it free of charge.

Content Entities

Clover Content currently offers several different content entities. These are as follows:

• Content Items - such as page or content area (or module) on a page
• Content Lists
• Blogs and blog posts

You can have one or more content items or lists on a page. Each content item or list requires a separate call to Clover Content to get the associated content (and as a result, a separate set of code snippets).

Content Items have a title, a body and a footer field. The body can be created using a rich text editor (FCKEditor). You can also add images to the content body. Images are stored in the File Libraries which are easily searched from the editor. The title and footer are straight text (they do not have an editor attached).

Content Editing with Clover CMS

Content Lists also have a title, body and footer and the body uses the rich text editor.

The blog feature contains basic blogging features including:

• Displaying a list of posts from new to old
• Providing permalinks to posts
• Pagination/archiving
• RSS feeds

Content Versioning

There is no content versioning with Clover Content. There are plans for a "draft" version to be stored, but currently the only version you see is the one you have on the website. Of course this means you need to be very careful creating and previewing your content before you publish it.

Workflow

This is no content workflow capability.

Multi-Lingual Support

Clover Content is English only as their current market does not have the demand for multi-lingual support. They have not ruled out providing multi-lingual content capability in the future.

Editorial Features

As a very simple CMS, there are not many editorial features for the administration. You can view the content items and lists you create, update and/or delete them, preview them, mark them as active and publish them.

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Tags: clover cms, hosted cms, microsoft, quick take, reviews, saas, saas cms, web cms, web publishing

Their website says it all: Clover CMS is a simple web content management system. Designed to provide basic content management functionality, the intent is to bring content management capabilities to organizations with only minimum requirements and a minimum of appetite for learning new technology.

What Clover Content offers is a straightforward way to create content for your website in a hosted environment, delivered to your website via two simple lines of code.

With this Quick Take Review (see more quick take CMS reviews), we show you exactly what Clover Content CMS is and isn't. Come take a closer look.