A couple of free lightweight content management systems are out there that are application hosted and use FTP to hook into websites and CSS tags to define editable areas (in the case of Cushy it is class="cushycms" and in the case of Surreal it is class="editable"). They are offered free because their business model is aimed at web designers rather than end users.
One of the big limitations with these systems is that they are only really good for existing webpages, not for creating new ones. There is also the issue of FTP security when someone else is hosting your access logins.
But once you overlook these, the systems are neat, quick and (mostly) very easy for end users to pick up.
Cushy had some great design ideas, but a newcomer, Surreal gives it a real run for its money.
There are two reasons why I have switched from Cushy to Surreal:
1. A frustrating bug in Cushy resulting from when I moved my site from a staging server to a new server, I could no longer edit the pages, even if I re-added them. Resulting in me having to create a new account
2. Surreal CMS is now set up to accept Cushy's tag class="cushycms" making it easier to migrate from Cushy
3. Surreal editor is hosted off a separate purpose built domain - edit-content.com. I've found downtime on Cushy which makes Surreal more suitable for higher demand websites
While it is clear that Surreal capitalises on Cushy's mistakes to gain marketshare and I found Surreal as easy to setup as Cushy, there are However a couple of the setup things weren't quite as easy as they could be. The interface and tabs for editing different fields initially confused me and tripped me up and they quite aren't as easy as Cushy. The rich text area is also a little trickier to use, and a little difficult to find the View HTML Source option initially.
However despite these things I'm quite happy to now use Surreal.
