Symphony.

Hi all,

I've been using Symphony for a few years now with great success. It gives me all of the power and simplicity that I could want. However, since I am just occasionally freelancing and building sites for fun, I go on this quest every six months or so to find a cloud-based CMS that gives me all the stuff I love about Symphony with less server administrative stuff. I have found some nice products, but nothing worth a jump.

Here is the latest: Osmek (http://osmek.com/)

The interesting thing about Osmek's approach is that it gives you a backend where you can create sections with custom fields, but give you no frontend tools. Instead, it provides an API to the content and some handy PHP libraries to get you started.

I think they have built some assumptions into the way their sections work and the pricing is a bit steep, but otherwise it is an interesting approach and a client-friendly way to build smaller sites.

Other cloud CMSs that I found interesting on my ongoing quest: Webpop (http://www.webpop.com/) & Vae Platform (http://vaeplatform.com/)

Anyone else have opinions or compared products in this space?

Osmek is a really interesting approach, a very clever business idea!

The interesting thing about Osmek's approach is that it gives you a backend where you can create sections with custom fields, but give you no frontend tools. Instead, it provides an API to the content and some handy PHP libraries to get you started.

Sounds a lot like contentful.com.

Yeah, still waiting for an invite from Contentful. Would like to see how they compare.

a very clever business idea!

I may as well pack up and go home, as this is what I am starting up right now :(

I may as well pack up and go home, as this is what I am starting up right now :(

You'll do it better.

I may as well pack up and go home, as this is what I am starting up right now :(

You know what really would make a difference? Having something like this an an open source (or at least self hosted) solution, so agencies could setup and maintain their own branded "cloud" platform for feeding content to their client sites and apps...

(or at least self hosted) solution

That was the plan. Sadly I am one man with a lot of personal commitments at the moment.

That being said, Osmek looks really good.

Symphony is different, and better. :)