At Supercool, we use a powerfully flexible Content Management System (CMS) called Craft, which provides an intuitive interface for administrators, and has an easily maintainable codebase for us as developers.

Having worked with other systems in the past, Craft CMS outshines them in all kinds of ways – from speed to security, from accessibility to ease of maintenance. (Not to mention, it's favoured by global brands including Mercedes, Netflix, Ikea and Sonos.)

Best of all, according to clients who’ve worked with other systems, Craft is easier to use, and considerably more flexible.

Why we (and our clients) love Craft

🤩 A well-designed, intuitive interface

Craft has a well-designed and intuitive control panel. This makes it quick to pick-up for both new and infrequent users. And even better – the control panel itself is responsive, so content can be added and/or edited on a mobile.

♿ Accessibility at its core

Craft's investment in creating an accessible tool aligns with our belief that websites should be accessible to everyone. The W3C agree. (They're the international standards body for the world wide web – the ones who set WCAG accessibility Levels A, AA, and AAA.) W3C recently selected Craft as their CMS of choice – largely based on its accessibility compared with other systems.

🔒 Reassuringly secure

Built with security in mind, Craft has fewer 'critical security updates' than more widely-used systems like WordPress and Drupal. (One of our Craft websites recently passed an intensive pen test. That's short for 'penetration test' – where a system is deliberately attacked, in order to find its vulnerabilities.)

🤓 A simple yet powerful and speedy system

The base install of Craft is deliberately lightweight. This makes it easy to build-on, maintain – and integrate with. We've integrated Craft website with all kinds of third-party systems – things like Spektrix, Tessitura, TicketSolve, AudienceView, YesPlan, Raiser's Edge and more.

With such a lightweight base, websites with even thousands of pages are speedy to load, and can handle large traffic spikes better than some other systems. (Though we still use external caching for huge on-sales.)

I absolutely LOVE the Assets section! Really easy to organise … I’ve literally bulk uploaded all images for one section of the website in 2 minutes!

Craig Russell – Marketing & Sales Officer, Oxford Playhouse

🤗 Strong developer community

Useful from our point of view, Craft has a strong – and growing – developer community, made up of professional, expert developers from all over the world. It may not be as big as the WordPress community, but bigger doesn't often mean better. Quality over quantity.

⭐ Great features for Admin users

Images can be bulk uploaded, and edited within Craft. There's even a 'focal point' feature to make sure faces aren't cropped, even if they're not in the centre of an image. The nifty Live Preview means you can see what you're building as you put a page together.

The ability to set various levels of User Permissions means people across an organisation can be given access to specific areas of the website; and not be overwhelmed. And sharing of unpublished draft pages – as well as being able revert to older versions – is hugely useful , and can be a big time-saver.

💪 Flexibility – Craft's secret weapon!

Crafts modular content blocks make building – and editing – page layouts in Craft really straightforward.

It's so good that WordPress released its 'Gutenberg' editor to try and replicate Craft content blocks. But the WordPress editor can be quite glitchy – and is inaccessible – in comparison with Craft.

In short – Craft has loads of powerful features, that work brilliantly for admins and developers; all in one lightweight package.