Honestly not everything will be possible in Volt CMS. And not everything can be implemented or should be from my point of view.
Volt CMS focus on simplicity and supportability. This includes the clear separation of design and content.
If you are able to create (by yourself) a CSS class defining this masonry layout (based on h1/h2 headers) you are able to assign this class to the content bric inside Blocs App, and the online content will follow that design.
Such a design option will not be available in the standard options, unfortunately.
New Blocs user here. I’ve used Pulse CMS in the past, I thought about upgrading ($149 USD), but I see Volt CMS is the new kid on the block. Besides its tight integration with Blocs, what are pros and cons of each? Pricing seems to be similar for me. I believe I read that Volt CMS does not currently support Blogs. Thank you for any insight. Cheers.
Hi Chikega, Like you, I’m a new user (about 5 weeks into learning Blocs now) and really enjoying it. I’ve done 2 sites, both now live using Volt, and it’s extremely simple to use. Both sites have about 90% of the content editable by the client should they wish:
(this one takes a bit of time to load as it’s full of sound samples)
My first stumble was not checking which php version the hosting service was on, but once changed to V7.2 or higher, all fine.
I think the main thing to remember is to set up your classes as you go along and assign them to your Volt Brics, as you can’t change fonts or colours within the Volt editor - that was my second stumble!
I’ve never used Pulse, and as far as I know there’s no support for a Blog imminent in Volt, but by a bit of fiddling, you could get a blog-like page out of it (ish), by judicious use of bold, italic, the odd picture etc. Not ideal but useable at a push if a client wanted to update a bit of news weekly or whatever.
Although I haven’t tried incorporating it into a Blocs project yet, a client of mine uses Blogger which is free, and it was the simple matter of copying a bit of code into an Adobe Muse widget - don’t know how easy that would be to implement in Blocs, but it seems doable, and when the Blogger blog is updated it’s automatically fed into the Blocs web page.
As theVolt developer has said, he wants it to be a lightweight CMS, but given what it says it does, it does it very well, and simple to use once you get past the 2 stumbles mentioned earlier.
I give Volt CMS a walloping big thumbs up.
The difference between Pulse and Volt comes down to what sort of editing features you want the client/end-user to have.
Volt CMS will be perfect in most cases
you design the site, and give the client access to make changes to content areas. This is all that is needed in many cases
Pulse will give you additional “advanced” features
Blogs. (coming for Volt CMS, but if you need one now, Pulse has them)
Ability for end user to make changes to the templates. A bit advanced, but Blocs produces Pulse CMS templates, and the end user can with a little training actually make changes to the layout, and not just content areas. IF you want to do this though, don’t use “Pulse brics” when building your Blocs site, but use Pulse tags instead inside of html brics
Blocs/Pulse also gives the end user the ability to add pages to the menu, but only if you don’t use the built in menu that Blocs has, and use the “Pulse navigation tag” instead
Pulse also has other things like access to Gallery tags, client editable sliders, they can “password protect pages” and a bunch of other “tags”
Volt CMS is a great product from a great developer that will do the job, and easy to setup and use. Pulse is a little trickier to setup, has a larger learning curve, (just do a search of Pulse CMS in this forum, some people like it some people hate it…) but if you need some “advanced features” does a really good job as well.
Now that Blocs 3.4.5 is out, I am also able to release my update to Volt CMS v1.2.1 including various updates to the Gallery functionality.
A new masonry layout as also the possibility to use a bootstrap carousel is now available. See the demo for examples.
Please make sure to update to Blocs 3.4.5 before updating to v1.2.1 inside the extension manager in order to guarantee all JavaScript libraries are included correctly in your existing projects.
For the ones still interested, I have currently a 10% discount active. Please use following discount code at checkout (last step in Paddle checkout), valid until end of March. VOLT-CMS-ROCKS
For any users out there looking for a capable, but easy to manage CMS with Blocs I have to say that Volt looks like the obvious answer and is clearly well supported with ongoing development. The new flexbox gallery option gives you choices not normally available in Blocs either.
I totally agree, I think it’s going to be a really nice addition to Blocs. Can’t wait to see how it grows.
Another thing that Volt can do besides giving a client access is speed up upgrades for a designer. I have some clients that don’t want CMS, one Real Estate site has a featured home that I updated about every 2 weeks. I set up Volt and now I can update it without opening Blocs. I real time saver.
This is great news Jannis. You may have seen my other post about not getting Blogger to play nicely and just showing an iFrame of the last post made. This may come just at the right time for me.
Very impressed with how Volt CMS works at the moment and I’m sure it’ll only get better.
Sooooo… you say you’re working on the edit mode at the moment, are we talking weeks, months or just how long it takes until it’s unleashed on the general public?
Cheers, and all the work is much appreciated.
