PowerCMS wishlist

I was excited to hear that design extended/particularly PowerCMS is next in line for an overhaul! Eagerly await this, but I wanted to throw out these suggestions that would be incredibly helpful after my years of using PowerCMS as my exclusive CMS for my clients. I am assuming there will be a decent amount of basic code changes/etc, so here are some features that I hope don’t get overlooked!

1) please give the ability for there to be administrator users who can create user roles and editors. To only allow the super administrator (which should still be there) to have the ability to create users forces us to constantly be receiving those requests, when an administrator role should have that ability.

2) as with above, users should be able to update/change their password/profile. That shouldn’t just be the Super Admin.

3) pages should automatically generate the Page Optimization fields like it does with the first Content area. This feature is nice, but it is a pain to create those three fields/content areas for every page - especially if a site has a ton of pages. Also, the developers notes link should be given for each.

4) allow the administrators/super admin to rearrange the pages in PowerCMS as well as the content areas. It isn’t always conducive to have the pages arranged A-Z same with the content areas. Often, it is better to have them in Menu order. You showed me how to create that ability for the pages once via a premium Support ticket - but I hope that will be a standard feature and that same ability given to the content areas.

5) would really love some type of Power Gallery (newer version) to be integrated with PowerCMS so a user can add a gallery and control it right from PowerCMS. Even better would be to add a Blog/Arricles and a Forum control as well!

6) for the pictures, it would be great if the url of the image could be shown. I have clients who use PowerCMS to upload a picture to the server to use for a diff program, and it would be great if they could copy and paste the image/file url from PowerCMS instead of me telling them what it would be.

7) ability to load classes from a css sheet and allow user to apply that class/style from a drop down for their images/etc.

8) ability to add the modern CSS effects (fades/glows/shadows/animations) to images from PowerCMS as well as to content (auto creates a div and applies the effect to it).

9) better copy/paste integration from Word. Even when using the “copy from Word” a lot of junk code gets integrated in current PowerCMS

10) responsive tables! When a user inserts a table it should automatically add code to make the table responsive.

11) don’t have the Admin_Cms images located in the site’s root “images” folder: that folder is often used by designers for the site’s images. More often then once, I have had the site’s logo.jpg image get overwritten by PowerCMS. Also, the site’s images get lost with all the PowerCMS images when you look through that folder. It would be much easier/better if they were in admin_cms/images.

12) please keep the template pages - those are extremely helpful and a great feature! Though for them to auto generate the full link for the user to use would be helpful!

13) please keep the history feature! That is extremely helpful and has actually been a selling point!

14) backup/download database: many CMS’s have a “download backup” feature. This would also be helpful for PowerCMS

15) easy way to upgrade older PowerCMS sites: perhaps some type of upgrade wizard that could be used to bring older sites up to date without having to do a ton of MySQL and Cole work.

Thank you for your consideration in these!

Thanks for the feedback. I'll save these and make sure to try to address what we can when we are working on this update.

Hey Ray - any update when PowerCMS2/Design Extender2 will be released?

I remember #11.... many of the other suggestions require a custom html editor to replace tiny mce or fkeditor. Wordpress comes to mind as they offer the same features.

Building our own cms systems still has advantages mostly for CRUD pages in inventory systems. Bootstrap foundations and the latest MySQLi behaviors really creates an efficient means for achieving similar goals.
The actual generation of new pages seems useful though a URL Rewrite rule coupled with. Single page using a url parameter can handle most of theses cases.

It seems our competition theses days is wix and squarespace and of course Wordpress though tools to integrate WebAssist pages into a Wordpress site would open up a world of benefit. Leave Wordpress for what it does well and somehow integrate WebAssist for our custom pages sharing the same theme. eCart integration into Wordpress would be an example.

Hi @Ray Borduin I hope you are doing well! Have there been any updates with regards to an ETA for Design Extender 2.0???? Really hoping this is close to release - I love using PowerCMS, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to use for new websites when there is no good reason to justify using outdated database structures :(

I have an early ALPHA of a version that should work on php7 here:
https://www.webassist.com/PowerCMS.zip

There is a lot of work still that I need to do to update other tools in Design Extender and add new features, but this may be a good stop gap.

Thanks so much! So good to see there is progress! Do you have an estimated time when you hope to have Design Extender done? Would you be releasing this version of PowerCMS for sale with an installer/updater as a standalone (like it used to be) while the rest of Design Extender is being updated?

To use the Alpha build is there an installer/license code needed?

Thanks so much!

------I did try to upload and run the Alpha version. I am getting the following error when I try to go to the site via /admin_cms/ or /install_cms/

Connect Error: Access denied for user 'pcms_user'@'localhost' (using password: YES)

The CMS files can just be replaced on your server. It works with the existing serial number for now.

I'm going to release it as part of the Design Extender update, not stand alone. This is a very early ALPHA. There are a lot of features I'd like to add still.

thanks so much - will give that a try. I don't have to do anything to the database then? Just copy/replace the files on the server and switch my PHP version?

There may be another column that needs to be added to a table in your database. It depends on the version you have installed. If you get any errors, just post them here and I'll help you work through them.