Simple Hosted Web Content Management with PageLime

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Jul 31, 2009

There are a few simple web content management systems available today. Cushy CMS, Clover and Surreal are three super simple systems that come to mind when we look at PageLime.

PageLime is a hosted web content management solution that let's you very easily add content management to your website without making a lot changes. Just give them FTP access to your site, mark up your pages with some CSS classes and you are off to the races.

Add Content Management Quickly

You may have built your website thinking you didn't need — or want — content management. But, like most, you have found that the need to keep updating your content to keep it fresh and relevant is becoming a bit of a pain in the you know what.

Enter PageLime. There are a couple of ways to use PageLime to manage your content. The easiest is by giving them FTP access to your website. They connect up and then you are ready to start marking sections for content management.

PageLime Manage Site

There are a number of different functions you can use with PageLime and you don't have to enable them all. You can edit your site pages, manage images, documents and templates, and work with your site map.

Selecting Edit Site opens your website in the PageLime editor. From there you can move through your website and select a page you want to add content management to. View the source of that page and add a CSS class to any area in the page you want to edit.

PageLime Make Page Editable

Upload the changed page back your FTP site and you can now start editing that page by clicking on a bubble:

PageLime Edit Page

The editor opens (if the selected area is text-based) and you are on your way.

PageLime Editor

Simple content management at your finger tips.

PageLime Features at a Glance

So you get the basic understanding of how it works, let's take a quick look at the features of this Web CMS:

Manage Multiple Websites: Manage all your websites through a single interface
Manage Site Structure: Browse your site structure and create new directories and pages for your website within the PageLime interface
In Place-Editing: Navigate though your website, find the page you want to edit and starting editing
Templates: Create templates to build pages with, create a template from an existing page
SEO: Manage metadata and descriptions for your pages
Image Library: Manage images for your website and make use of a zoom and crop tool to select sections of an image to use
Document Library: Upload and manage documents to be used within your website

Add to this a history of your changes, the ability to set a folder or page collection for an RSS feed and manage editing permissions and you have yourself all the basics for content management without the expense of hosting and maintaining it yourself.

PageLime also intends to offer some professional features that will not be available with a basic account. The first professional feature in the works is support for the iPhone.

Don't Like FTP?

PageLime does offer a developer API that will let you pull content into your website through web services. In this situation, PageLime is not updating your files but publishing an XML file that you access via their web services API.