Firerift… a completely new breed of CMS
For quite some time WordPress has been the daddy of blogs, and is most popular blogging platform of today. One of the reasons for this is that WordPress is much more than just a simple blogging tool – it is a bespoke Content Management System too. I use WordPress to manage by blog here, so WordPress is a very powerful management tool and enables designers to create custom CSS blog themes, like the one I have styled here.
However, there is a problem… if you don’t know PHP, then there are limitations to what you can do with your template. And this problem is not exclusive to WordPress, pretty much all CMS platforms have the same problem, or shall we say, template limitations.
Firerift is a completely new breed of CMS just launched, and from what I have seen so far… I am excited. In a nutshell, and without going into too much (boring) technical detail, Firerift enables designers to create content managed sites very easily from a CSS/XHTML based design, by entering CSS Class names in the XHTML, which goes back to the database and pulls in the content. There is nothing quite like this out there, and the CMS interface is sophisticated state-of-the-art JSON coupled with a very strong design.
Quote from Drew Wilson at Firefirt.com:
Firerift is a future technology. It is definitely a pioneer in the CMS space, and I am certain it is on the right track.
The genius behind Firerift is a California based designer/developer called Drew Wilson. To find out more about Drew Wilson, check out his website at drewwilson.com, and follow him on twitter @drewwilson.
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Makes sense.
It really does, and should empower a lot of developers. For me it is ideal because it will bridge the gap between the front end and the back end – excellent.
Mmmm. Anyone spot the glaringly huge problem? It’s built on a Javascript Framework. Have fun trying to use it with javascript disabled. Always develop with server-side language and add Javascript for the niceties such as AJAX calls and animations.
Apart from that, I’m totally impressed with it.
I hear what you’re saying Clinton, but in this modern Web 2.0 day and age surely most people will have JavaScript enabled – without that browsing the web isn’t a very fun experience. The product isn’t really being marketed for the average Joe at the moment, it appears to be more of a solution for those that work in the Web Design industry. It is an early release of the product but I see good things happening for it.
How are AJAX doing in the dutch league anyway?
Ajax is doing pretty good, thanks.