Being more the visual and not the bracket-dot-hyphen-ampersand-guy gives me headaches from time to time. Following the rising need of customers to alter their content ‘personally’ by setting up, customizing or mashing up large open source CMS like Joomla! or typo3 is time-consuming and not funny. These systems have a huge overhead of functions which my clients do not use – but I have to adjust most of the time (â€?Yes, please. Perhaps we will use it later…â€?). So I was pleased to follow the invite to review on a new content management system called “Light content management systemâ€?.

Light is a web-based content management system on a hosted basis that specifically addresses designers and agencies to provide their self-branded design and CMS to their clients. Signing up takes about 5 minutes and gives you a free account for testing and nibbling around the system.

Finding my way around was fast: due to the clear and sufficiently precise help files (online or downloadable for further reading during the family picnic on the weekend) I managed to focus on the main issues for setting up some pages in just one hour . I’m somehow familiar with coding but not to the extent that people stop by my office to touch my hair or worship my knowledge of PHP/MySQL or semantic markup at FOWA. But that’s not necessary with “Lightâ€?.

The system consists of three mandatory page templates, the suitable CSS and some data-fields named “tokensâ€?. These tokens allow your prospective client to interact with the CMS: to add, delete or modify the predefined containers. Tokens have a precise syntax <$regionâ€?$> and attributes like this : <$region name=â€?MainContentâ€?$> defining the main editable region in a template where your clients can add text, pictures, blog entries, forms, a gallery and more. Defining breadcrumbs, root or side menus is easy as eating cake (unless you’ve diabetes).

If you don’t want to use the nicely designed templates (which are six in total) it gets more tricky: although Light provides an online tool to alter CSS parameters it is somehow tiring to surf to the presentation view every minute to see the result – at least when you’re me (so, don’t be me). Having a firm grip on the CSS language will be necessary to achieve satisfying results within the system. Plus the editing window isn’t quite providing the big picture due to line breaks every 100 letters or so. I allowed myself the smooth way and just mashed up an existing template offline with Coda.

It is recommended by the company and fairly easy to design your templates offline, slice them up, zip them and upload into the CMS. A slight drawback is the fact that direct access via FTP is not provided – so avoiding going back and forth might be an issue for further development. Speaklight also provides a service called “HTML-Expressâ€? where you get your design nicely sliced within 5 days to implement in their CMS but that will certainly depend on the budget you’re willing to give away.

Conclusion: if you want to achieve the value-add of a CMS for your customers which is easy to administer and operate, Light is definitely an option. With their sophisticated pricing strategy and the ability to down- or upgrade monthly it can be a good start to grow with the number and the needs of your customers. The service of being able to offer the essential pages and plugs for a client in nearly no time provides an asset which gets more important (not to say vital) for a Designer these days. Plus: you are able to brand the CMS and (in the near future) the Help-System with your own logo. The missing FTP option and (not mentioned above) tricky customization of the form module could become an implementation issue to boost the number of satisfied designers.