Surreal CMS content overwritten after Blocsfile update?

Hi there, anyone of you Blocsusers out there using Surreal CMS? It looks great to me (inline editing) and much more affordable then the next Pulse 5 version ($297,-)

But, as with more flat based CMS, if my clients makes online changes in the content, if I later update my Blocsfile by FTP the online version, with those latest changes, will be overwritten by my update!

Is there a trick to avoid this? Is there a way to sync content?

Anyone any idea? Very welcome!

Andries Kuipers

With Pulse @spoetnic you can make changes to the template and it works fine. Just update your Template folder and don’t override the content :slight_smile:

We’ve mentioned that in this post:

Hi Andries, I made more sites with blocs in combination with PulseCMS. Works fantastic!
When there is an update or I have to change something in the design, I simply do it, my client don’t notice anything.
Here a dutch site for example: www.het-boekje.nl
See her blog site, its updated frequently

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Thanks Sandy. I suppose that you only make changes in the template too if it concerns layout or design issues. Surreal can’t solve this now, perhaps in al later version.

You could always contact Surreal directly and pose your question or concerns and see what they say and advise.

Hi I did already last week. There is not a real solution within the software right now, it will after the launch of version 6 or 6.1 in 2018. In Pulse the template is apart from the content.
There should be a trick to solve it but I’m not quite sure how and if it works.

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I think its trade-off - You sacrifice certain advanced facilities for dead-simple editing with a product like Surreal. This is because it doesn’t use a template as such - you’re actually editing the content in the web pages. Of course, if you were the super administrator, you would have the ability to edit everything, including source code, CSS and JS. However, your clients would normally be restricted to just editing pictures or text content. For many clients, that’s all they really want.

I have a number of clients who absolutely love the simplicity. In many cases, all we do is design a Blocs site loaded with dummy content and leave the client to add all the text and images themselves. And at a cost of about $10 per month for up to 5 websites, Surreal is good value for money.

Of course, if you have clients who don’t mind the added complexity of a templated solution such as October or Pulse, then you would offer them those options. But, for the average small site owner, Surreal is just perfect.

@hendon52: I normally deliver the website as a complete product the first time when it gets online. So the client sees all text and pictures in the best possible way.

Then it’s up to them if they want to change it, but if I let them do all content first time it wil get a mess the first hour they start. Too small pictures, different fonts, strange abbreviated text etc.

Surreal would think of a solution, I will mail them one of these days to hear.

Surreal CMS creator here. Let’s talk about your workflow a bit so we can solve this. I’ve made some changes to how revisions are purged in the new version. It should be easy enough to revert content during a special “sync” process, but it might require some help from Blocs to make it seamless.