Big thanks goes to folks from Impress Pages team for helping with the content for this post.
ImpressPages CMS is an open source content management system created for content managers by the folks that previously ran a web design agency. Founders have worked with many different systems and had delivered websites for hundreds of customers before their own content management system was born. And they took many previous challenges into account while designing new CMS.
Lessons
Running a web design agency teaches a very important lesson: content managers are not developers. They know how stuff on internet works, yet they don’t feel too comfortable under the hood. So ImpressPages CMS was born at one unpretentious web design agency called Apro Media. ImpressPages CMS eventually span off as a stand-alone product, and the company got VC funding in summer 2013 to continue development.
Features for content managers
ImpressPages CMS has been built to help the content managers. For this reason, some unique features were created and are still rarely found in other CMSs.
Inline editing. Simply speaking, this is a possibility to edit the actual page the way one sees it as opposed to working with dialog boxes or content fields somewhere under the hood. Just open any page of your website in the administration mode and voila – it’s the same page as your visitors see, yet you can click anywhere and edit text, colours or pictures on the go.
Drag & drop interface. It supplements inline editing with widgets – pictures, videos, galleries, polls, various forms, etc. Content managers can choose any new item they need and simply drag&drop it to a spot they desire. Editing these items or changing their location is also carried out by dragging and dropping. This makes managing websites intuitive and requires no knowledge of HTML, let alone back-end technologies.
Smart copy&paste. However weird it may seem, copied content being distorted when pasted into a CMS is among the top time and patience wasters for the content managers. ImpressPages CMS solves this issue with copied content styles automatically adapting to the style of the page you are pasting it to.
Never forgetting the developers
While being marketed as a user friendly content management system, ImpressPages CMS is being built by developers who love clean and efficient code. For this reason, ImpressPages CMS code is made as easy to expand with plugins. Any developer can write his own custom plugin after reading the documentation.
The same goes for creating ImpressPages CMS themes, i.e. design templates. And if someone feels confident to share his themes with others – ImpressPages CMS features Theme Marketplace where themes can be sold or given away for free.
What’s to be improved
The biggest disadvantage of using ImpressPages CMS is a still-small amount of extensions it offers. While it has a few dozens of plugins readily available, deeper customization would require writing new plugins for specific purposes. However, should someone write one, there is a Plugin Marketplace on ImpressPages CMS roadmap to be launched later this quarter.
