Got intercepted by the guys at PageLime CMS during a Twitter conversation about something related to CMS’s and ended up checking out their site and system! The power of Twitter eh!? I’d like to do a quick review of their site, software and service here. I’ve seen a similar system to this before but this is well impressive. The basic idea with their system, which is a hosted, online service (SAAS) is that, instead of building a new site using a content management system or re-building one from the ground up to include a CMS, with PageLime you can quite easily apply the CMS to an existing, static site which is quite cool!

The PageLime Website is quite nice looking and easy to navigate. Their Demo Video made me want to try it to see if it actually worked because I couldn’t envisage one website being able to access and update mine as described! Signing up was painless and I got a nice, human looking welcome message from one of the site owners.

The control panel for the CMS is quite slick but perhaps my only gripe would be that, I found it slightly hard to navigate initially. Sometimes simple rather than slick is best guys!

So here’s how the system actually works. You need to add a CSS class ID to any section of your pages or even images to make them editable with PageLime. This is easy enough to do for any decent web designer and not something a client would need to do. While this might be a bit of initial hassle for a large site, at the end of it you’ll have a site that can be completely updated by a client but you can keep layout areas blocked in case they do damage. Client user accounts can be added easily and the system includes an image browser/uploader and everything else you might need without having to resort to external applications although webbies might find it hard to part with Dreamweaver and the likes for adding the CSS code.

The system is currently free but might be monetized soon so give it a bash quickish!

Leon.