I spent some time this morning looking at PureEdit. It bills itself as a CMS, which is a classification I don’t know that I can agree with completely.
For the record, I only watched a couple of screencasts and browsed through some of the code. I don’t know if it would call it a CMS based on the definition we offered a few months ago, since there’s no higher CMS functionality: versioning, workflow, check-in/out, granular user management, etc. (PureEdit is, actually, every bit the “RDBWAAS” mentioned in the afore-linked article.)
What PureEdit is, however, is a nicely slick way of managing some database tables. Call it a very polished version of phpMyAdmin. It lets you, the developer, create a very usable interface to let non-developers manage database records of a database you created.
This is handy in a lot of ways, because there’s no over-arching data storage architecture to worry about (it’s your database, after all), and there isn’t any publishing architecture either – no templating or other stuff to worry about. You can just pull content from the database on the front end as you see fit, just like you’ve known how to do for years.
This is a nicely way to solve the problem we discussed a couple of years back: The Quandary of the Single Table Web Site.
What do you do with sites that need a single table of data updated? These are sites which are totally static, except for this one thing…
[…] This happens a lot – the sites are all static except for one element, be it a list of locations, events, the ubiquitous “Latest News,” etc.
What I like about PureEdit is that its datatype handling is pluggable, so you can think up a way that a user needs to manage a field, and the edit interface will present them with a customized widget for that datatype. (Example: you could plug in a Google Maps interface, have the user select a location from it, and then store the lat/lon information. This is something we’ve done for eZ publish, but it’s order of magnitude more complex in that environment.)
I also like that there’s no publishing mechanism. In my experience with content management, I’ve always felt this was the most wasted area of effort. Content publishing is vastly more simple than content management or editing (see The Value-Add Side of Content Management, CMS’s Should Manage Content, Not Display It and CMS Administration vs. Presentation Languages).
So, consider PureEdit a cross between phpMyAdmin and a full-blown CMS. It’s a nice, handy way to let non-developers manage tables of data.
It’s at version 1.1, and I’m excited to see where it goes. Add versioning, check in/out (or just simple record locking), and some more finely-grained user management (this user can edit records in Table A, but not Table B), and you’d really have a heck of a piece of work.