I’ve been playing around with DropPages a little bit lately, which people are billing as “DropBox as a CMS." I don’t quite agree with that statement (see below), but it’s still very neat.
The idea is that you create a folder in your DropBox and share it with a DropPages account (belonging to one of their servers). The server syncs against this folder, and uses the contents in it to render a website.
You get some additionally functionality as well, namely a templating system and some CSS automation (CSS Agent and Less). In this sense, it’s less of a content management system and more of a templating management system.
What DropPages appears to have done is create a version of Nesta, which we discussed a couple months ago. I was a big fan of that system, but I didn’t think it was a CMS either.
I wouldn’t go so far as to call this a “content management system." It strikes me that it’s more of a “templating system”).
The fun angle with DropPages, of course, is the integration of DropBox itself. But what is DropBox really providing? I can think of two things: (1) data transport and (2) versioning. These are great things, for sure, but you could do the same thing with a source code management system and FTP.
Still, I really appreciate the ingenuity here. I think there’s a couple things that could be added to this to really make it shine (a good content indexing system, for instance), but I will admit to having a huge smile on my face when I was playing around with DropPages.
(I’ve also learned that there’s a similar system called Pancake.io. I have not used it, but it appears to play in the same space.)