An amazing content editing experience

One of the key reasons our clients are raving about Craft CMS is it's content editing experience really is first class. The Craft control panel is incredibly user-friendly and intuitive compared to other popular CMSes out there. We always try and provide our clients with access to a 'work in progress' version of their site as soon as possible. As a result, many of them become very capable users of the content management panel before we’ve had a chance to finish the site and provide training. Here are a few of the features Craft has that make it excel in this area:

Live preview

Content editors can preview a page as you’re creating or dropping content in it. See how content will look before it goes live, without jumping back and forth between Preview and the content entry fields.

Craft CMS also lets you create shareable URLs for page drafts which allow you to share your work with others (without requiring a login) and get feedback before making changes live.

Content matrix

The content matrix is one of the core page building mechanisms within Craft. The matrix allows content editors to build beautiful and varied pages using repeatable content blocks; avoiding a large, complicated WYSIWYG field.

Allowing content authors drop in and arrange blocks of varied content increases the likelihood that site visitors will actually engage with the copy and read it all the way through.

Craft eCommerce

Craft CMS has a robust and feature-rich eCommerce extension available. This provides the usual eCommerce features such as a shopping cart, easy product and stock management, promo code and sale functionality, and advanced tax management. But unlike many eCommerce platforms on the market Craft Commerce is set up to work with completely custom business logic.

Every eCommerce store has some business logic. Some are standard across all sites like the need to apply tax or shipping costs. But many of the eCommerce platforms out there are too structured in their built-in business logic which means if you are selling something a bit different or have specific customer groups you might struggle to get the platform to accommodate your products and business rules. Custom business logic is important to get your product and pricing structure perfectly represented on your website.

Not locked into a vendor

Craft CMS is not the property of any one agency or web developer so it’s easy to find developers with PHP expertise who can work on it. This means you're never locked down to one vendor and there's no shortage developers or agencies who can maintain and build on your Craft platform.

Security

It probably gives you some confidence knowing that many big name brands are turning to and trusting Craft CMS. This trust is not unwarranted, Craft does a huge amount in the background to improve the security of the software including:

• Craft uses PDO for database queries to prevent SQL injection attacks
• CSRF token validation to prevent CSRF attacks
• Twig auto-encodes all HTML by default, helping avoid XSS attack vectors.
• Max invalid logins to prevent brute force attacks
• Craft jumps through some pretty significant hoops to ensure in-app purchasing is secure even on installs without SSL enabled.
• Craft helps prevent session/cookie hijacking, by doing things like storing the browser's user agent string in the identity cookie and validating that it matches on subsequent session requests.
• Craft's codebase has been frequently audited by third-party security firms and with tools like OWASP's Zed Attack Proxy Project.

Maintenance and Support

Craft CMS is created and backed by PHP development company Pixel & Tonic providing extremely regular updates, and a well documented, and fully featured API. In addition, there’s a strong, active, supportive, and growing community working on improving the platform. Craft CMS features one-click updates, and excellent stability, scalability, and security.

Speed

Craft 3 significantly reduced Time to First Byte, Query speed, and memory usage, by nearly 70-80% in some test cases. This demonstrates how seriously they take performance. Twig used for templating which enhances both the speed and security of a website.

TL;DR

We really like Craft CMS and Craft eCommerce. With its ease of use, security, and flexibility it excels in more ways than any other CMS we’ve come across and we think you’ll love it too.