The Features of Fast Edit

So you want to know everything that Fast Edit does? well, you've come to the right place! Here you'll find a detailed breakdown of the all inclusive features that the latest Fast Edit has to offer. (Currently Fast Edit v1.0)

You can also compare all versions of Fast Edit, in a handy table grid layout.

Fast Edit

Fast Edit is password protected; the username and password for one admin user is defined in the main config file.

The actual editor uses the very wonderful TinyMCE for its easy-to-use WYSIWYG toolbar. It is totally customisable, so you can chop and change what buttons appear on the Fast Edit editor or even make your own using your own functions! The pre-assembled toolbar already includes buttons that will (presumably) suit most users, but if you want to re-jig everything, you can. Just take a look at the TinyMCE examples page for all available options.

File Manager

The File Manager uses the excellent TinyBrowser, to allow you to manage your website files. It works in standalone mode and is also plugged-in to Fast Edit's WYSIWYG toolbar so you can easily insert images and other media on your web pages.

You can set how you want the File Manager to be used in the main config file. You can decide whether you want to be able to upload and delete files and also create, delete and rename folders to nicely structure your files.
You can also set maximum upload limits and permitted file types to make sure nothing nasty ends up on your hosting server.

Template Manager

The Template Manager is simply a text area to allow you to edit a pre-defined, custom stylesheet.

Typically, you would pull out all the critical CSS styling and save it somewhere safe in a seperate stylesheet, but then offer less critical styling options, such as font colours, to be edited via a custom stylesheet in the Template Manager. And, if you don't want to use the Template Manager, no problem; you can disable it in the main config file and that option magically disappears from view.

Page Manager

What turns Fast Edit from a simple web page editor into a small, yet functional CMS is its Page Manager. It doesn't have all the fluff that a large CMS might have but it has enough features to be useful to the owner of a small to medium sized website.

The Page Manager comes in two flavours, which you can enable via the main config file. In "basic" mode you can view all the pages of your website in a neat little table; see when a page was last updated, make backups of web pages, see the date of your backups, preview the backups and restore them if you make a mistake.

Additionally in "advanced" mode, you can create new pages, delete existing ones and also set which pages appear in the menu and which ones hide in the background; great for making sub-categories for your content!

Extras - Dynamic Menu

An automatic menu goes hand-in-hand with the Page Manager. This clever little tyke reads all the pages of your website from the root folder and automatically makes a menu out of them, excluding the ones you tell it to hide via the Page Manager of course.

The menu is easily customised using CSS and uses an unordered list format so the buttons can be styled to lay horizontally or vertically.

You can also set how you want your menu items to be ordered in the main config file; A-Z or by page creation time. Using the latter, you can control the menu order by making new pages in the order you want the buttons to appear. Unfortunately, the current automatic menu does not support multi-levels/sub-levels but this will be a feature of Fast Edit v2.0, along with a "Sub-Page Manager" to categorise your content and a "Metadata Manager" to easily set global or page-specific keyword and description meta tags that will improve your website's findability via search engines, so stay tuned...

Owing to the current menu's one-level limitation, if you prefer not to use the automatic menu, that's fine, just remove reference to this particular script from your website header file and code you're own to suit.

Good stuff - Let's see a demo!

So, you've patiently read through all the individual feature's bumf above, now, let's get you over to the live working demo to test Fast Edit in person.

• Also see, Fast Edit v2.0 demonstration
• Also see, Fast Edit v1.0 demonstration
• Also see, Fast Edit Mini demonstration

Suggest a new Fast Edit feature

If you have any ideas for new features (to appear in future releases of Fast Edit), or changes you'd like to see, please feel free to contact me and let me know.