Here’s a little explanation for those, who have recently joined us:

The product that will be released tomorrow is Fancy CMS free open source core in a package with two free cms templates. The so-called Fancy CMS Core is a flash CMS engine, and it does not have an admin interface for the end users. Thus the product we are about to release is solely for flash developers.

The full version of Fancy CMS with an admin interface will be released later on and will be a shareware.

Now let’s get to the teaser, that the whole post is all about! Here are 2 more screenshots of the outstanding Fancy CMS admin interface:

• Screenshot #1 represents Site Background window. You have the options to customize the Main Background and add an additional background to the footer. Your custom images can be scaled and positioned on the template.
• Screenshot #2 shows Main Settings window. You can edit your Site Name, Title, Slogan, Copyright and image logo here. But what’s more important – this is the place, where you define the site structure, by adding Submenus, E-commerce, Search Sitemap and Breadcrumbs.

As we have promised before – the core will be released under a free license for private usage and under commercial license for any profit-oriented needs! Here’s the quick guide into licensing:

Free License / Commercial License

As far as you can see two flash cms templates that we have showcased earlier will be contributed under the same license. If you have any questions in regards to licensing – please leave them in comments.

We’re also going to launch a discussion board to support our core and discuss any bugs you may find.

1. – Is FancyCMS free or what?
Basically FancyCMS is not a single product: it is being divided into the core itself, the templates and the admin interface.
As we have announced earlier FancyCMS core will be open source and we’ll give it out under free license (more on licenses soon). We’ll also give out two flash cms demo templates for free. And this will happen within the next week !!!
Ok. We have the admin interface and premium templates left. Those will not be free, and, besides, we’ve decided to leave the admin interface for further development and improvement. So it will be released a bit later, than the core.

2. – How does FancyCMS cater for those developers looking for a back end to fit in their front end, is there a class library or something? also do you use xml or a different system for storing data?
Yes, we do use xml for storing data. And the core will have an open source code, which we have tried to make plain and readable. So it will not be an issue to use FancyCMS core to manage your content. Basically that is why it was made open source

3. – Are you planning to launch full functional flash e-commerce with the CMS supporting anti fraud check, sales tracking and customers management or should we expect just another dummy script that simply forwards the customer to PayPal?
Yes, we are intending to create the full functional flash e-commerce interface, however it will only be available with our admin panel. The opensource core itself supports PayPal only.

4. – Will you offer flash remoting support?
No, flash remoting will not be supported with the nearest released version of FancyCMS.

5.1. – I would be grateful if you could spread some more light on the process of site editing abilities for unexperienced flash users. I’ve read somewhere at your site that all graphics elements and fonts will be stored in some sort of external file or something. Could you please explain?
5.2. – How friendly is FancyCMS gonna be for the common user (wysiwyg) ?
Fancy CMS is targeted towards developers: opensource core; and the “unexperienced flash users”: user-friendly admin panel with a WYSIWYG editor. However in case you need to do some major tweaking of the design, you will have to refer to the .fla file which will contain all of the design parts.

6. – How many developers are working in the FancyCMS ?
At the moment we have 2 people developing FancyCMS.

So I thought it would be great to give you the opportunity to communicate with our developers directly!

Feel free to post any questions about the upcoming software in comments below. Since our developers are extremely busy with the product itself, we gonna pick the most valuable ones to pass them. And in a day or two we’ll post exhaustive answers from our gurus of Flash development!

Waiting for your questions!

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Some Project news:

At the present moment we’re testing the admin interface, the engine itself and the skinning abilities. We’ve got certain issues with media galleries creation: the layout of the gallery differs from a single page layout (because of 3-level menu). So we’re trying to rework the admin interface a bit to be a lot more easy and convenient.

A little tidbit that I want to share with you is that we actually gonna use Fancy CMS admin panel design as a basis for our website template design! I am more than sure that it will look great and play a major role in our branding campaign!

I’ll keep the rest of website design ideas in secret to surprise you a bit when we switch skins

As for the software itself – I will post some detailed reports after the website redesign! Keep in touch!

So, here is what is done:

2. Shopping Cart

• the cart is made as a pop up: in such a way it can  stay on every page of the website as the user browses through it and it is easy to move;
• you can add up to 3 parameters (later even more) for each product

3. The data upload has been optimized
4. The content you upload is being cashed.
5. Admin panel:

• the Undo option lets you set how many steps backwards you can go to;
• a useful file manager to manage files you upload to the website;
• you can  create sections, pages, move them and change their order;
• simple and news content section.

This was the general list of what is already finished, right from my to do document. Well you can see now that all  the main work is done, but there still are some important things to be fixed. This is what in the process of development now:

• the  internal logic of the blog is undergoing some changes now;
• we do the refactoring of the menu system;
• making a more simple way to change  parameters for the products selected in shopping cart;
• a site-map with a flexible skin option;
• finishing breadcrumbs;
• the skin system needs to be optimized;
• the admin panel development is on the stage of creating the galleries: we want to make it be as  usable a possible and have a lot of features and options;
• the comment moderation tool in the admin panel is almost done;
• there are also some bugs that come up when you add content, so we are working on that.

Actually  I’ll try to make demo that will have all the functions available at the moment.  In such a way you will be able to see everything on your own and even help us by reporting the bugs you might find.

Well, does not  look neither like nothing, neither like a lot…. So I hope there is  a chance to get this finished pretty soon Keep your fingers crossed!

I felt very lousy on Christmas and spent the New Year in hospital, but now I’m fine and eager to continue working on Fancy CMS. Unfortunately, the release needs to be delayed once more, but I hope this will be the last delay. I need to look through everything once more to estimate how much time is needed to finish, so stay it touch!

Oh, yes: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

We regret to inform you that it was decided to delay the release date a bit. It’s not about the software is not ready yet, or has some major bugs. Everything is fine and works just as good as expected! We just want to spend time optimizing our shopping cart and reworking the whole Ecommerce module.

We are very sorry for making you wait but FancyCMS is an open source project, and we really want developers to have a fun time dealing with it. That is why our beloved platform needs to be released in its best shape!

The release date is 5th of January! Hope you’re even more excited now! Sincere apologies to everyone involved.

One of the main incarnations of some-one’s online presence is a website, no matter what is the purpose it was created for. But still a creation of website remains to be a prerogative of specially-educated people, and is a kind of a rocket science for majority. People know that developing a website is about coding, and coding is a magic spell for most of them.This is the reason why developers now put so much effort trying to erase this barrier, so that website set up and managing could be a process that can be performed by any human at any moment of time. This is what the main idea of the CMS is.

CMS are a bridge between people and their websites, they allow to set up and manage websites without any specific knowledge. In fact, they work like a magic wand: you do not need to study magic of coding, memorize secret spells (read tags), all you need to do is to wave with your wand and say “I want a website!“…. and here it comes.

CMS are not a know-how anymore, but their evolution is still at the beginning stage. As it is clear from the name – CMS, or content managing systems, they are meant to manage content, which is add/change/remove all types of the information presented on a website. All the actions you can perform in terms of content are about its editing, but not about changing the way it is  presented on a web page. All appearance-related functions are limited to basic operations with text and other types of content; more complex operations demand special software and/or skills.

The variety of CMS presented today is great, they differ with the range of functions they provide, by their main purpose and many more other criteria. Some CMS are very-well developed, have a large amount of components available for them and a nice interface, and due to all this are considered to be universal. Among the most popular are Wordpress, Joomla!, Drupal and some others,  though  some of them initially were created to serve specific needs (WordPress as a blog manager, Data Life for news resources, Drupal – for social networks).  In fact, as you read descriptions of these CMS and look through a list of components available for each of them, it might seem that anything the user can  need is possible.

But time sets a new  level of merit for every generation. Today the functions of CMS are not sufficient to suit contemporary needs, though may be it is not quite obvious yet.
Future is about highly interactive websites, revolutionary designs and touch screens, if you want. It will not  be a mistake to say that we are standing on the edge of huge changes in the way content is organized on the website, the very structure of the website designs. If you try looking at the websites listed in beautiful websites showcase, you will hardly find there standard column designs with what we all are used to see. Instead, you will see there a great percentage of websites created in flash, with spectacular effects and unusual structure.

Flash websites Colorchakra and ImagineAir

Future is about flash. Among the first evidences of these changes are so-called flogs, or flash blogs, that are becoming more and more popular these days. Flash websites are notable for their unmatchable flexibility not only in design, but in terms of website managing as well. It is not only content that needs to be edited, but also the structure of the website, the disposition of basic elements, and sometimes the whole design as well. And there is no need in any extra software, precisely anything you need to do can be done with your CMS.

If you try to compare the possibilities provided by flash and non-flash CMS, compare their main features, here are the points you will see the difference at:

Flash CMS are actually very different from what is usually meant under this name. They do have all the functions of a regular CMS, but they have even much more. Flash CMS is not only a content manager, in fact there is a possibility to manage anything about your website using it. Such CMS has a lot from a site builder. The amount of functions a flash CMS provides is not a question of technical possibilities, much more it is a question of what the developer of CMS has decided to add as a function. It depends a lot on the purpose of a CMS.

There is also a point of security, as the CMS needs to care that an amateur user does not do some fatal changes by accident. To avoid this, there needs to be a diversification for content, design and functional. This question was hard to solve for flash CMS of the first generation, but in the last days we can see flash CMS of a brand new level being released. They provide a strict division between logically different parts, what makes using a CMS be simple and safe.

Flash is still young, but its potential is huge.  As the amount of flash websites online grows, more and more flash CMS (flashcmsreview.com) are being offered too. It is useless now to compare existing flash CMS and non-flash ones, as they are now on totally different stages of their evolution. The thing is that the potential possibilities of flash make expectations be much higher, and there is a lot to be revised. Though many still argue, it is becoming evident, that flash is turning out to be not a  type of websites (and CMS as well), but a new step of their evolution.

• Parque

This website impresses with its simplicity and interactivity: as you navigate through it, it keeps living its own life. The color combination is also great.

• The FWA

This flash website is notable for advanced search and sorting options. Fancy CMS team works to make it possible to edit a website with the same functionality through our flash CMS.

• Dead-Line

The website looks very fashionable and impresses with unusual menu design.

• Brantt

Flash opens new navigation possibilities. The type of navigation presented on this page works perfect for portfolio and other gallery websites.

• DioDao

This flash website has a very juicy and clean design, nice effects.

• Enila

Unusual structure of this website was possible to make due to flash, and works great to make this website look unique.

• Tony DiTerlizzy

With development of flash technology more and more cartoony website designs started to appear on the Internet. This and two next ones are the great examples of this style.

• Roth Aniko

This in fact looks more like a fairy tale than a website, you can just sit and watch what is happening on it for some time.

• LoWorks

You will also be able to set up online stores with Fancy CMS, like this one. The website is made in pleasant pastel colors and has nice hand drawn shapes.

• Tommys Hair Company

Picture slide show of this hair company website is made with nice effects. The whole website looks very clean and stylish, what definitely helps attract clients.