Custom Content Management System

A content management system (CMS) is a software system for organizing and facilitating collaborative creation of documents and other content.

Working on various recent projects showed the need for clients to be able to manage their site content in an easy and non-technical fashion. This need drove the development of a site structure based around the development of a custom CMS.

Working with Jonathan Clough from Cedars Digital we developed this Custom CMS. It was initially developed for the Uki Village Site (view in the portfolio). It's since been expanded and used to solve other clients content management needs.


The goal of the CMS is to allow the site owner / operator to maintain site content in a secure manner. Current information can be added/updated/deleted at anytime in a user friendly and easy fashion.

The CMS allows administrators to format web pages using a friendly interface.

Key CMS features include:

• Secure site administration area to allow site administrators to securely administer site content.
• Comprehensive site membership management to allow members of the public to signup as members of the site.
• Membership access level gives site administrators the ability to assign individual site members an access level.
• Content Security - pages and their content can be assigned an access level which allows viewing only by privileged site members. This allows administrators the ability to secure certain areas of site content and allow entry by "invitation only"
• Page Management - allows administrators to create/edit/delete individual site pages. A page's publish status allows the page to be taken "off-line" without loosing the page's content.
• WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get) document editor for easy text formatting, placement of images etc. Very similar to Microsoft Word. The open source FCKeditor is used to provide many of the powerful functionalities of desktop editors.
• Image Gallery - images are presented as a list of thumbnails with the ability to enlarge all images, and run a slideshow of all gallery images. All images are referenced by their meaningful names which allow search engines to easily index all image content.
• Image Gallery Administration - facility for each created page to have image(s) uploaded into a gallery. Images can be assigned names, and descriptions and their creation and last edit date are stored.
• Document Upload/Download - admin upload facility for documents (e.g. Word or PDF documents). Documents are then publicly available for viewing/download.
• Extensive custom written help files, with screen shots and full documentation on how to use the system from a novice user's perspective.

The entire system was built using semantic markup and CSS for layout and presentation.


Get in touch today to see how you can take control of your site's content.

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