CrafterCMS Enterprise Authoring (Ubuntu x86_64)

What do you like best about the product?

CrafterCMS is exceptionally versatile. It enables us to serve any content to any type of digital experience and integrate with any external system we need to.

What do you dislike about the product?

We have not encountered any negatives or things that don't work well for us.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We're using CrafterCMS as a content and integration hub for our digital experiences. CrafterCMS makes integrating our timing, scoring and media with our web, mobile apps and digital signage simple and easy.

What do you like best about the product?

The authoring experience is pretty good. I like that Crafter puts a lot of thought into content management and makes developers and authors focus on how that content is managed within the system. I have seen other CMS systems where the CMS turns into a swamp of content.

What do you dislike about the product?

While I like that Crafter handles everything via Git repositories, sometimes the underlying Crafter repository seeps its way into my developer's processes -- the Crafter repository is a leaky abstraction. The code forward/content back model proposed by Crafter is good in theory. But dealing with DEV/STAGE/PROD release cycles can get messy very fast because the content is getting created at all three levels, DEV/STAGE for testing and PROD for the real content. Then if you have to change the configuration files in one of the upstream environments (STAGE or PROD) -- a hotfix config change -- that makes merging your code from DEV messy. I would like to see more effort put into improving this developer experience.

I don't like the fact that groovy is the only programming choice for most things in Crafter. We should also have the option to use Typescript/Javascript throughout.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Crafter allows our content creators to create and publish changes outside our normal product release cycles. Once the developers have enabled the in-content editing, there are now large parts of the application developers don't even concern themselves with. This allows our developers to focus on our sites' more dynamic, data-oriented features without worrying about managing large blocks of static content. Our developers are also recommending new content areas that authors can manage, which means they are starting to understand the benefits of content modeling.

What do you like best about the product?

Crafter CMS has a great support team that is very helpful during challenging times. Logging options are very flexible which helps to quickly diagnose problems. Updating content, deploying the changes across the cluster are very simple tasks. From a development & deployment perspective, Crafter is a dream.

What do you dislike about the product?

My biggest dislike is the way Crafter syncs data between repos. I suppose Git is a better than the old option of Alfresco, but Git working across clusters has been prone to conflicts which are sometimes a mess to work through. There's got to be a better way.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Crafter continues to upgrade their products to be more user-friendly. That allows me to spend less time troubleshooting Crafter servers which is very helpful.

What do you like best about the product?

I like that the delivery (website in our case) is separate from the authoring environment, which means we can deploy releases at any time without impacting the end user.

What do you dislike about the product?

The version that we currently use requires an instance of Elastic that is outside of the Crafter environment and our internal security policy makes that difficult to maintain.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We are using CrafterCMS to store and maintain content related to a public website. The information served on the site is a combination of video-on-demand, live-streaming video and articles. A consolidated platform to maintain access to this content is beneficial.

What do you like best about the product?

I like the way content types can be created with ease, and how various pieces of content can be embedded in any content type. The ability to create multi-lingual content is very helpful as well.

What do you dislike about the product?

We're still using version 3.1.27, yet to upgrade to 4.x, but I find that earlier versions don't have the ability to edit content on mobile devices. The only way to access the context menus from the sidebar is with a right-click.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Crafter allows us to integrate content from various external sources for video-on-demand, live streams and resources from AWS S3 buckets. It offers a better way to manage all of our content, components, pages, and scripts in one place.