Instant Update - Open Source CMS
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I have been reading your forum for some time and never had guts to say something. Here it is
I wanted to create CMS that has no template structure. It can parse any HTML and "converts" it into CMS through HTML IDs. Since only one and half developers worked on this...well things are still far off from the original idea.
Here you can take a look at the demo:
http://instant-update.com/cms/index.html
This is all new so please be as gentle as possible
Learn more about it here:
We need coders that would like to help us with the project. It is build on heavily modified Codeigniter2. I am not fan of kickstarter bull crap but it might go that way as our last resort. Thanks!
Edit: Darn! Just remembered you have bad ideas thread :)
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Not bad, I like it, though I'm no CMS user. One cool point would be to provide a Docker image.
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Docker is nice for complicated platforms like Discourse, but Instant Update is simple MySQL and PHP solution so I guess there is no need to run it separately through the docker since every host supports it. I might be wrong, but docker is complicating too many things on the user end. Great for developers I admit.
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I wanted to create CMS that has no template structure.
One of your screenshots says "edit template". Another lists "template files".
It can parse any HTML and "converts" it into CMS through HTML IDs.
I'm having trouble visualizing how this could work, and the website demo doesn't appear to have this functionality enabled? Or I'm not finding it?
Do you have a live demo of this?
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One of your screenshots says "edit template". Another lists "template files".
Correct. These are HTML templates meaning you can use one template (HTML file) to create many pages. Template can be any HTML file. This is not your regular CMS template, but we could not find better name for it.
I'm having trouble visualizing how this could work, and the website demo doesn't appear to have this functionality enabled? Or I'm not finding it?
Yes. We had to disable this due to security issues. It works fairly simple you just drop any HTML file (copy/paste) into CMS directory and visit that file in your browser. Instant Update will automatically recognize all HTML IDs. You can even drop website as folders as many as you want.
You can skip any div id with iu-skip class:
<div id="content" class="wrapper iu-skip">
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Ooo, I see what you're doing.
So is the idea that I can for example take a few (rendered) webpages from my existing WordPress template, drop them into your product and it would automatically separate the "template" portion of the files from the "content" portion in the CMS?
Then it would also take the areas that differ, and create a new "template" based on the WordPress template so I could make future web pages with the same look and styling?
Pretty slick, if so.
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Yeah, and while at it, it will create a new thread and make you a cup of coffee in parallel.
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As a lead developer of the Instant Update CMS I felt like joining the discussion.
I'm having trouble visualizing how this could work, and the website demo doesn't appear to have this functionality enabled? Or I'm not finding it?
Instant Update doesn't have it's own (or any other) templating system like Wordpress or Joomla have (or even Discourse). Everything is done automatically and on-the-fly. When you request yourwebsite.com/index.php/somepage.html, Instant Update's index.php will process "somepage.html", find DIVs* with HTML "id" attribute (which, by HTML specification, should be unique for each element per page), then find matching contents in the database, inject them into HTML and spit out modified HTML.
Note the index.php/ part in the URL. It is actually doing the whole job. And if you're using Apache with mod_rewrite you can easily hide index.php from URLs, so your links will look like yourwebsite.com/somepage.html, mimicking direct HTML file access (like we did in our demo). I know both MS IIS and nginx have similar URL rewriting possibilities, but I've never used any of them so I don't know how to set up rewrite rules on those (any help would be awesome
)Now, each page on the site has it's own HTML file (or template how we called it in the admin panel). But you can create another page which will use existing HTML file, and you'll have two pages sharing same HTML file (design) but containing different contents.
When you edit DIVs using Instant Update (either front-end simple editor or full WYSIWYG editor in the back-end) all changes are stored in the database, and will be displayed to end-users using previously described technique.
edit:
So is the idea that I can for example take a few (rendered) webpages
from my existing WordPress template, drop them into your product and it
would automatically separate the "template" portion of the files from
the "content" portion in the CMS?Then it would also take the areas that differ, and create a new
"template" based on the WordPress template so I could make future web
pages with the same look and styling?In theory, that would work. In reality, you'll have to make some JS/CSS/HTML changes.
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So it's a normal CMS, but with Convention over Configuration taken to the extreme? Doesn't sound like my cup of tea TBH.
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Well yes it is CMS after all, but instead of creating template for particular CMS you can just code HTML.
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Yet another cms.
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Just had a look, I have no idea how to make things like partials, share components between pages.
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Docker is nice for complicated platforms like Discourse, but Instant Update is simple MySQL and PHP solution so I guess there is no need to run it separately through the docker since every host supports it. I might be wrong, but docker is complicating too many things on the user end. Great for developers I admit.
I'd encourage you to package it up in Docker anyway. You can leverage the existing images for MySQL and PHP (someone must've done that already, yes?) so the amount of work to put things up will be quite small.
End users won't care. They won't see how things are deployed. People who do care will mostly appreciate having the heavy lifting done for them, and most will prefer to deploy in a VM in the first place. (You can always do other distribution mechanisms later if you want, but Docker lets you get multiple playgrounds out there easily.)
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Just had a look, I have no idea how to make things like partials, share components between pages.
Each editable region (div, article, section, ...) will be shared between pages if it is marked as global content. For example if you have DIV with id "navigation" in the sidebar of your page(s), simply mark it as global and it's contents will appear on all pages having DIV with id "navigation".
I'd encourage you to package it up in Docker anyway. You can leverage the existing images for MySQL and PHP (someone must've done that already, yes?) so the amount of work to put things up will be quite small.
I have no real experience with Docker, except with some Discourse testing, but I'll look into it, how it works and how to make a Docker image (or however this Docker software package is called).
