Which content mangement system is best?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Andre Rodziewicz
  • Start date Start date
A

Andre Rodziewicz

Question 1. What is the best tool (free or paid for) for customers to
update selected pages of a FP 2000 website?

Setting "initial page" to remote URL in one frame works but needs
providing a html template for customers to work on and upload to their
free space. Really messy. Worse is sending Word templates and asking
customesr to save as web page & upload. These possibilities put-off
customers (and me) and would cause customers' pages to differ in style
from mine.

Contribute 2 involves each customer purchasing and learning to use it.
Pulling in content from a database involves a steep learning curve.
Emailhtml at http://www.emailhtml.com, is a paid for hosted solution,
but relies on the third party continuing in business and their server
being up.

I want something browser based (if possible) and really easy to use,
for me and for customers.

Question 2. I come up with a suitable method. Customer updates their
content. I then make a change to my part of the page and upload. FP
then overwrites customers' update! Is there any way round that? I
don't wish to FTP to server as I know that can damage the FP
extensions.

Best regards,
Andre Rodziewicz
 
If the customers are going create complete Web pages or
mini-Websites, you should create a subweb for each
customer and tell them to buy FrontPage.

If the customers only need to update specific data, design
HTML forms for entering that data, save the data in a
database or XML file, and then write ASP or ASP.NET pages
to merge the supplied data into templates.

Jim Buyens
Microsoft FrontPage MVP
http://www.interlacken.com
Author of:
*------------------------------------------------------*
|\----------------------------------------------------/|
|| Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 Inside Out ||
|| Microsoft FrontPage Version 2002 Inside Out ||
|| Web Database Development Step by Step .NET Edition ||
|| Troubleshooting Microsoft FrontPage 2002 ||
|| Faster Smarter Beginning Programming ||
|| (All from Microsoft Press) ||
|/----------------------------------------------------\|
*------------------------------------------------------*
 
two simple content management systems:
http://aspportal.net which I used for a "help desk" which I'm not in love
with: http://nedp.net/support
and a cool one in php: http://cmsimple.dk which I used for a couple of
things: http://leighton-smith.com and http://songexpert.com/index.php
there are tons of online editable/ updatable content management systems.
here is a good link for trying out a bunch of php/ mysql ones:
http://www.opensourcecms.com/
I wish someone would come up with something like that for asp portals.
HTH
 
Jim Buyens said:
If the customers are going create complete Web pages or
mini-Websites, you should create a subweb for each
customer and tell them to buy FrontPage.

If the customers only need to update specific data, design
HTML forms for entering that data, save the data in a
database or XML file, and then write ASP or ASP.NET pages
to merge the supplied data into templates.

Jim Buyens
Microsoft FrontPage MVP
http://www.interlacken.com
Author of:
*------------------------------------------------------*
|\----------------------------------------------------/|
|| Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 Inside Out ||
|| Microsoft FrontPage Version 2002 Inside Out ||
|| Web Database Development Step by Step .NET Edition ||
|| Troubleshooting Microsoft FrontPage 2002 ||
|| Faster Smarter Beginning Programming ||
|| (All from Microsoft Press) ||
|/----------------------------------------------------\|
*------------------------------------------------------*
Click to expand...

It's the second option. I like the idea of the forms to database &
into template, but am confused as to how this will enable the updated
content to contain hyperlinks, text that is bold/not bold and other
formatting that I would normally use in web design to make the page
attractive. I thought forms could only handle ordinary text, similar
to these forms for the newsgroup.

Best regards,
Andre
 
you can put anything you want into a database (including pictures and .zip
files as BLOB).
If you're not doing anything that requires "dynamic generation" I would
encourage you to try www.cmsimple.dk it's very, very good.
btw I don't get anything for saying so, it's just the truth.
 
It's the second option. I like the idea of the forms to database &
into template, but am confused as to how this will enable the updated
content to contain hyperlinks, text that is bold/not bold and other
formatting that I would normally use in web design to make the page
attractive. I thought forms could only handle ordinary text, similar
to these forms for the newsgroup.
Click to expand...

Normally, yes, Web visitors can only submit plain text. Of course, you
can format it any way you like on output, provided the information is
tightly structured.

If you want the customers to enter unstructured content that contains
hyperlinks and typographical effects, that's more difficult. One
approach is to let them create and upload HTML pages, then write a
special ASP or ASP.NET page that:
o Reads a given page.
o Extracts whatever lies between the <body> and </body> tags.
o Surrounds that with the style sheets specs and page headings you
want.
o Sends the results to the visitsor who requested the page.

This enforces most kinds of stylistic contentions you might want.

Another approach (also not easy) is to use the rich text editing built
into Internet Explorer. With this, you can display a form that
contains a text box with the same capabilities as the rich content
editor in Outlook. When the visitor clicks submit, you can get the
results as HTML and store it in a database or whatever.

If this seems attractive, here are some URLs to follow:

Richer Data Entry
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dndude/html/dude10222001.asp

The MSHTML Editing Platform in Internet Explorer 5.5
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnmshtml/html/mshtmleditplatf.asp

BTW, this second approach only works if the content authors use
Internet Explorer. But usually, there are only a few such people, and
you can just tell them which browser to use.

If you don't like the IE approach, there are many third party products
that do the same sort of thing. Search www.google.com for "rich text
box html".

Jim Buyens
Microsoft FrontPage MVP
http://www.interlacken.com
Author of:
*------------------------------------------------------*
|\----------------------------------------------------/|
|| Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 Inside Out ||
|| Microsoft FrontPage Version 2002 Inside Out ||
|| Web Database Development Step by Step .NET Edition ||
|| Troubleshooting Microsoft FrontPage 2002 ||
|| Faster Smarter Beginning Programming ||
|| (All from Microsoft Press) ||
|/----------------------------------------------------\|
*------------------------------------------------------*
 
Thank you both for your feedback. I still like the database option
best & will get clued up on that.

Best regards,
Andre Rodziewicz
 
Back
Top