As a lead developer of the Instant Update CMS I felt like joining the discussion.
@blakeyrat said:
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.