[Web4lib] CMS or something else?

[Mark Gilman]

I realize that a true CMS has many potential advantages; however, if one is
looking at Contribute, then perhaps there are other products that compete in
the same niche and function more-or-less the same, such as:

WebEdit
http://www.interspire.com/webedit/

Another approach might be to hide the administrative controls on your CMS
and use a desktop client like ECTO
http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/archives/000990.php to do the updates.  I'm not sure
this would work, but it would seem feasible, at first glance.

On a related topic, the WebDav protocol would seem promising:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebDAV  

Anyone know if this is leading us closer toward making "the World Wide Web a
readable and writable medium, in line with Tim Berners-Lee's original
vision"?

Regards,
Mark 


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Message: 23
Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2006 15:03:41 -0700
From: "Tyson Tate" <tysontate at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: RE: Re: Re: [Web4lib] CMS or something else?
To: "McHale, Nina" <nina.mchale at cudenver.edu>
Cc: Web4Lib <web4lib at webjunction.org>
Message-ID:
	<6d12b83c0609011503j73ab911cjfe5ae3382ec36ec2 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

Major downside to Contribute: You have to prefix ALL CSS selector
names that you don't want shown to content writers with "mmhide-".
That means that most of your class and ids will end up being something
like mmhide-booktitle, etc.

I have 2,000 lines of CSS in our redesigned site. Short answer, coming
from a web developer: I banish Contribute from the land!

(And, not to mention, we have enough troubles with Dreamweaver. The
piece of junk! *grumble* ;-)

-Tyson

On 9/1/06, McHale, Nina <nina.mchale at cudenver.edu> wrote:
> Contribute--while it's not a full-blown CMS, depending on your
> definition of the word--does this. It's WYSIWYG; in fact, no code view
> is even available, and the user interface looks more like MS Word than
> Dreamweaver. Web authors create new files based on HTML templates that
> the webmaster creates beforehand in Dreamweaver. So, once the template
> is there, authors can grab the template, create a new file from it, put
> in their content without seeing a single tag, and publish with no extra
> markup required by yours truly. It still requires me to come up with the
> templates, obviously, but I don't have to touch every file that goes out
> there. Other editorial checks are in place for content; for example, the
> instruction coordinator has to approve content on any new subject
> guides. But, it never has to come to me.
>
> Nina


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