Surreal uses FTP (or SFTP) to access your sites, publish pages, upload files, and more. This means that you can keep your existing web host, and since there’s nothing to install, you can start integrating right away. When you make changes and upload files through the CMS, everything stays on your web server—right where it belongs.
Once you start using Surreal, we doubt you’ll ever want to use anything else. But in the event that you do, you can leave at anytime with no strings attached. Your site will continue to work and all of your files will still exist on your server.
We work hard to make Surreal as simple and powerful as possible, but there are a few things to know before you get started. The following tips will help you with your first site, but for more detailed information, we recommend reading the section on integration as well.
Before using Surreal—and as a good practice in general—you should always make sure you have a backup of your site somewhere in a safe place. Since Surreal works with files directly on your server, changes you publish become permanent. Even though Surreal keeps track of page revisions, you should not rely on them to recover lost or overwritten files.
Surreal’s HTML parser is pretty resilient. Your markup doesn’t have to be perfect, but it should be free of mismatched tags and other significant structural errors. If you find a page isn’t publishing as expected, chances are you have an error that the parser tried to fix during the publishing process.
One of the best ways to check your pages for structural errors is with the W3C validator. To aid in repairing erroneous markup, there is an HTML5-compatible Tidy tool built right into the CMS.
Surreal publishes content in UTF-8 format, so your pages need to be configured as such to avoid problems with non-Latin characters. If you’re not sure what this means, you should definitely check out the section on character encoding.
Surreal generally works well with pages that contain server-side scripting such as PHP, ASP, ColdFusion, and others. However, for best results, do not place any scripts or other non-HTML elements inside of your editable regions. This will often lead to the scripts being removed after publishing.
We strongly recommend reviewing the integration section before you dive in. There’s a lot of good tips and tricks that will help you make the most of your experience with Surreal, such as defining content regions, using include files, and enabling page properties.
Our policy on file ownership is clear: you upload it, you own it. We don’t store any of your files—including pages, documents, images, or media—anywhere but on your site. If you ever decide to leave Surreal, your site will still function as expected and all of your files will still exist on your server. Not in the cloud. Not with a hosting service. On your server.
For technical purposes, files must be uploaded to our system for processing before we can send them to yours, but we don’t keep any copies and we remove all traces of them once they reach your server.We will never try to lock you in by holding your files hostage. That’s just bad business.
Surreal CMS works best with modern browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer 9+, and Opera. Internet Explorer 7 and 8 are also supported, but users may notice subtle differences in appearance and speed. These users will have the option of installing Chrome Frame to enhance their browsing experience.
Security is extremely important to us. We take every precaution to ensure your data is safe from unauthorized access. This is especially true for (S)FTP credentials, third-party authorization tokens, and other sensitive information. For your protection, we use 128-bit AES encryption on all sensitive data—the same encryption that governments throughout the world use to safeguard top secret information. The bottom line? Your information is safe with us.
In addition, users can access the CMS securely by visiting https://client-cms.com/. Unfortunately, due to the way SSL certificates work, it is not possible to access custom domains over SSL without receiving a certificate error notification.