The technology is clearly ahead of its time. But a new client side CMS named firerift has my attention.
At first glance, Fire Rift is impressive. The CMS has set out to make life easier for developers by only managing your content via the CMS. No more hacking of your html and css to fit the limitations of your CMS’s templating system (often archaic and completely different across various other CMS’s.) With Fire Rift, you cut and code your psd and let Fire Rift take care of the content via css class names or javascript.
Meet the interface:
Creating content looks dead simple thanks to a back end that is hands down the cleanest I’ve seen from any other cms editor. See the overview video for more info.
Ahead of it’s time:
With every new CMS there are issues that may get in the way of fulfilling your project requirements. The biggest debate centered around Fire Rift is the questionable handling of content for SEO. The problem is that Fire Rift is a javascript based CMS. That means the actual content on the page relies on javascript to be displayed. Try a view source of this Fire Rift powered example page to see what I mean. Google’s search engine reportedly only has the ability to index content via an onClick event. Meaning google only sees your html framework sans the content from the CMS. This fact alone is the EPIC FAIL flaw of Fire Rift. It may just work against you when competing for top results against other server side CMS systems serving up similar content in the page.
In my opinion this is a great step forward for dynamic content. As many browsers focus on boosting javascript performance and treating the web as an app thus blurring the lines between desktop and cloud computing. But this CMS is not ready for primetime. Unless google finds a new way to index content via javascript (completely possible but not in the near future) or you go ahead and also serve up static content html pages (rendering the idea of a cms useless), I would consider it a beta idea that would be fun for designers/web developers to experiment with or use on sites that truly do not need to be spidered every day for content.
Garrett