This is the second time I’ve written this article so it’ll be much shorter now. Damn you back button!

I’ve been using vBulletin to create a webmaster social network at MySpacePros.com for the past month now and while it has all the features I need, I can’t imagine using vB for a social network that wasn’t aimed towards webmasters. As awesome as it is, it’s a beast to work with. What would I use then? WordPress. Or more specifically, BuddyPress. Take that last sentence with a grain of salt though, because I’ve never actually seen it in action. This is all just speculation.

Given automattic’s track record with offshoot products, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that while well-implemented, these new features are going to be light. Let’s take a quick look at those features. Again…

Extended Profiles
This should be “Extensible Profiles” as you need to do all the leg work. It works much like the Custom Fields option in wordpress. Well, exactly like it actually.

Personal Blog
Opening the door to use WordPress as a competitor to wordpress.com, users will get their own blog at either “/membername/blog/” or “/membername.domain.com/blog”. Finally!

Private Messaging
An internal mail system between users is pretty mandatory.

Friends
The friends aspect is tied into the Extended Profiles so you can match make based on those fields. Very Cool.

Groups
The most notable part of the Groups feature is the (option?) ability to tie it into bbpress and give each group their own discussion forum. Keep something in mind though: When you do this, it will kill a lot of forum activity - which is why I haven’t and probably won’t do it on MySpacePros.

The Wire
Apparently The Wire is the name for the bastard child of a 3-way between twitter, myspace’s profile comments and facebook’s The Wall…

Albums
One of the best ways to get traffic from Google.

Status Updates
I.e: Mood. Not important enough to make a bullet in my opinion.

It may seem like I’m being hard on BuddyPress, but I’m not. They’re just a couple years late to the party and they didn’t dress for the occasion. I’m sure it’ll provide a good foundation for the community to improve on, but at least it’s something.

This is an update to a post made earlier today.

Last week I posted a Cushy CMS review that received quite a bit of attention. A few people expressed interest in the flat file CMS that I mentioned I use internally, so I wanted to post it. From this point on I’ll refer to it ask Skeleton.

You can grab it here: Skeleton: flat file CMS

Cushy CMS bills itself as an online content manager created to “take the work out of managing content” that is “Super. Easy. To. Use.”.

Account creation takes less than 30 seconds from start to logged in. They score big points from me on this. Had it not been so fast I wouldn’t be doing this review. Anything that makes me click a link from my email to verify an account and then manually enter my login details irritates me enough to pass it by completely. You can get signed up and start using it faster than you can type this sentence.

Once you’re logged in, it works like this:
You set up a site like you would in any other IDE. Tell it the name of the site, FTP info and where your root folder is. Anyone who has used DreamWeaver or something similar to create a Project/Site won’t have any issues here. No software is installed on your server and nothing runs on their server, which is where I have a problem with them call this a content management system. It’s more like a RCE (remote content editor).

For every file you want to be able to edit with Cushy CMS you must first create the file in your offline editor and apply the class “cushycms” to any section of the page you want to edit. You can make the heading and content editable or the whole damn page, it’s up to you. Once you do this and upload the file you’ll be able to log into Cushy CMS and edit those sections from there using their simple (read: vanilla) WYSIWYG editor.

That’s it. That is Cushy CMS. Well, mostly.

The value in Cushy CMS - it’s free by the way - is in that you can create these simple sites for clients and then give them access to edit their sites. Giving them access is as stupid easy as creating an account as well. The downside to this free account is that they go to cushycms.com to log in and see the cushycms branding. Somewhat unprofessional, no? The $28 a month pro account however, gives you completely white-label branding and allows you to assign it to any domain of your choice. You don’t get the software, but it’s on your domain with your logo and to your clients it just looks like you have your stuff together.

My opinion of Cushy CMS is that it fills a niche very well. These guys saw a whole in the market and gobbled it up. The interface is nice and it just works. It’s easy to understand and easy to implement (albeit time consuming). However, it is not - in my opinion - a CMS. It allows you to edit content on a per-page basis. The content has to physically exist on your server and it’s all static unless you build yourself a flatfile CMS of your own (if you want one, I’ve got one I use personally. Comment below and I’ll send it to your email address). Cushy CMS isn’t going to replace WordPress, but for what it is, it’s great.