CMS Commander Review
If you are an internet marketer, then it is likely that you have more than one site on your books, in fact, most marketers tend to have at least a few sites, even when just starting out.
Maintaining and updating your fleet of websites can be a troublesome job, logging in and out of numerous websites, clicking each and every update button. Then there’s the plugins and the themes. The list goes on.
And it is so easier to forget a site or to forget to update at all!
CMS Commander comes to the rescue!
CMS Commander is service that helps you connect all your sites in one. It allows you to post, update, add and remove plugins, and more, from any site via one dashboard. All you need to do is add a plugin to each site.
What does it do?
- Manage all your sites from one Dashboard
- Manage multiple CMS types
- Bulk posting across multiple sites
- Autoblogging
- Bulk setting updates
- Bulk plugin and theme installation and updates
- Backups – schedule back ups to email, server or cloud storage with ease.
- Clone Sites – creates an exact copy of a site, so you can make cookie cutter sites.
Logging into CMS Commander for the first time was like “whoah” that’s a lot of options. Having a read of the first page brought me to the Documentation and First steps section.
Reading through the documentation doesn’t take long but is worthwhile. It’s easy to read and follow and explains every step you need to make.
Your Sites
Adding a site is very easy, though first time round involves an extra piece of work. Simply log into your site, upload the plugin and activate it.
Then in your CMS Commander dashboard, under Your Sites type in the data required: Site url, admin name and an optional group name (to keep things organised) and click add site. Done in less than 2 minutes!
Another awesome feature (well I thought it was awesome) is that it can handle multiple CMS’, so if you run several WordPress, Joomla or Drupal sites, you can still manage them all from one dashboard.
Sources and Options
The service allows you to add autoposts from around 30 sources such as Amazon, Youtube, or custom RSS feeds. The sources and options sections allow you to choose which ones, if any, you want to use and the individual settings for them.
Some of the sources don’t require any extra work, but most of them do require you to go through a sign up process, and most of them are free to do so.
Post Editor
Here you can quickly and easily add a new post to one or multiple sites, simply by writing it as normal and selecting one or more sites from the list on the right.
Almost everything is here like scheduling, categories, etc, like in a normal WordPress dashboard, but its not in the same place, so whilst it is easy enough to find, it will be a short learning curve. It may have been nicer if they had followed a standard WP dashboard layout a bit closer.
One thing that was missing though was tags, couldn’t find them anywhere. Whilst not a big thing, I use tags all the time, so I am hopeful that the developers will include these by the time the alpha goes live
Posting to multiple sites is near instantaneous, and by the time I had flicked over to the test site I was using, it was there, exactly what you want, no messing about.
Bulk Content
This is where the Sources you choose earlier find a home. You can shoose a source, generate the content via chosen keywords and then post it to one or multiple sites. This is a really great feature if you use a lot of content from other websites.
Content
If you need to find content on one of your sites, a review, or article that you need to quote from for example, you can find them here. Generate a list from all of your sites or individual ones of the content currently on that site, either by a search term or all of it by leaving the search area blank.
You can edit or delete that content at the click of a button.
Users
Pretty much the same as content, it will list all users on all sites . You can delete, edit and even create new users directly from here.
Not only that but you can create bulk users, either manually or via CMS Commander, including email address (all are @cmsc.com or there is an option to add your own email addresses). Again, if you are dealing with anything autoblogging related, it is a useful addition.
Configuration
Perhaps better labelled, Site Settings, this area allows you to amend individual or bulk site settings. Straightforward and easy to use.
There is an advanced mode where you can really dig into the settings, but this isnt advised unless you are an advanced user of that CMS.
You might be thinking here that an import/export feature would be nice, I thought that too, but then realised that the Clone Site feature (see below) is just as easy to do.
Content Types
This will actually be blank for most people, as it is related to Custom Post Types. Still if you use them you can manage them from here.
Categories
You guessed it, you can update them all, add news ones, edit, delete, the whole nine yards.
Plugins and Themes
Adding and activating plugins and themes to multiple sites is awesome! Really easy to do. One thing that was missing in Beta though was the ability to upload plugins and themes, I emailed the developers on this though so it should be available soon.
Backups
Often people fail to backup one site, let alone 20, which is just crazy! Backups will save you froma heart attack if and when something bad happens. CMS Commander makes it really easy, so easy in fact you won’t need an additional premium plugin, which is always nice!
You can choose full (i.e. with files) backup or just the database (the written content and settings, no images or files). You can Schedule these, daily, weekly and monthly.
One of the best features is that you can choose where to send the backups, including the standard server (no point if your server goes boom) or to email, or to cloud services like Dropbox!
As seems to be normal for some reason, the service is missing a “backup now” button, which I do find occasionally useful, but this seems to across the board with a lot of backup services and plugins.
Cloning sites
How easy is this? Really easy. Select the site, click the backup button next to the site name, and then select a blank wordpress site with CMS Commander installed (of course) and hit the clone button.
One word of warning. I know a lot of my readers are Wealthy Affiliate members, and use WA’s free hosting service. When using the clone site, the file permissions are reset to really secure ones for the themes and images, so you may need to manually change them, otherwise your cloned site might look a bit weird.
Otherwise it works like a charm!
WP Robot
To continue with the support for autoblogging, CMS Commander also integrates WP Robot should you have this plugin. The makers of CMS Commander made WP Robot so you can guarantee a close integration.
How many sites?
The beta version limited me to 50 sites and 25 bulk items, which can be increased by sharing the platform with your friends on social networks.
How much is it?
Pricing hasn’t been announced yet, but it is likely to be competitive.
Conclusion
As I have been reviewing the Beta version of CMS Commander, it is still a little rough around the edges.
I think that once this service goes fully live, the other big dog in the market, ManageWP, will have a serious contender on their hands.
Though CMS Commander does have some focus on autoblogging, which I personally feel isn’t something a marketer should do, it has many, many other worthwhile features beyond that that make this an awesome management system for multiple sites.
If you have multiple sites and are finding that managing them is becoming a pain, take a look at CMS Commander, it really is a good platform and will quickly become one of the leaders in that niche.
You can sign up to CMS Commander here – cmscommander.com
03/09/2015 @ 12:48 am
Thanks for your thorough review on CMS Commander.
It sure makes sense to have one dashboard to perform a lot of WordPress / blogging activities from.
And joining it doesn’t break the bank considering the time you can save using it.