Is Craft CMS the Right Choice for You?

Content Management Systems come in all shapes and sizes but their function is the same - they are systems for publishing, editing and maintaining content from a central interface. It’s important to choose a CMS that’s right for your team from the outset, and which can evolve as your business develops. In this blog we’re looking at Craft CMS, highlighting some of its standout features and showing how it could meet your needs.

What does Craft CMS do?

Craft gives us the tools to sculpt a content management experience precisely tailored to our client’s needs. Every business’s content is unique and can often be varied and unpredictable.

Design flexibility

Craft is a great platform to build beautiful, content-rich websites, without compromising the content architecture.

User-friendly

Many of our clients are familiar with CMS platforms such as Wordpress, while some are entirely new to the world of content management online. Yet all of them are amazed at how simple and intuitive Craft’s admin panel is to use. With every new project, we start by evaluating the skill-set of the client’s in-house team and determining the roles of individual content managers. We can then configure Craft CMS appropriately, giving the client freedom and flexibility to manage their content with ease. Users have the ability to edit, update and manage content and the CMS will automatically format the changes within the website’s established design guidelines.

SEO friendly

SEOmatic is a plugin for Craft CMS that handles SEO for your site and allows the user to publish SEO-optimised content with ease. Adding custom SEO to your individual entries across the site is also simple. Custom features include:

• SEO Title
• SEO Description
• SEO Keywords
• SEO Image
• Twitter Card Type
• Twitter Card Image
• Open Graph Type
• Open Graph Image
• Default Robots Meta Tag

Image editor

With Craft 3’s built-in image editor, users can crop, rotate, and straighten photos and ensure their positioning is correct. A nice feature is setting focal points so that Craft knows which area of the image is most important when applying transformations.

Preview & versioning

Craft features an excellent Live Preview function with a split-screen view that lets you view changes in real time as you type. You can also share preview URLs with colleagues for feedback before going live, so your content can be proofed fully before being made public. As an extra precaution, previous versions are saved as revisions are made which gives you the ability to roll back to a previous version if a mistake is made.

Localisation

Unlike other CMS platforms that rely heavily on plugins for localisation, Craft allows you to manage websites in multiple languages, related websites in the same language, or both.

User permissions

Craft offers a robust user permission system in which users can be created, modified and deleted at any time by an administrator. Craft's user permission system can be tailored to fit all user roles, from administrators to editors and authors.

Security

CMS security is something that is often overlooked, and CMS platforms rely on being constantly updated to avoid them becoming susceptible to security flaws. Platforms like Wordpress which rely on plugins are typically more vulnerable to security issues. Craft, however, is routinely assessed by independent third parties, so you can have peace of mind that your CMS platform has been thoroughly tested and your content is safe.

Our thoughts…

Craft is a feature-rich system with excellent security and powerful yet usable functionality. Pixel & Tonic, the company behind Craft, are making constant improvements and are supported by a passionate online community. Not only do we love Craft, but our clients do too.

If you would like to find out more about our work with Craft then get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.