[thelist] Am I being BS'd?

Robert Goodyear rob_goodyear at yahoo.com
Wed Feb 20 15:57:01 CST 2002


 Janet:

 As indicated by another evolter, your solution lies in a
 modular architecture. The site structure, navigation, and
 constants need to be wrapped up into includes, database
 calls, or HIGHLY segregated and commented sections of the
 HTML.

 Since you mention FrontPage and MS Word, I'm going to go
 out on a limb and throw some ideas at you that are
 Microsoft-centric...

 At the low end of complexity (well, that depends on your
 perspective, really) would be HTML pages that are nicely
 commented and segregated, so that a user could open the
 pages in a visual editor and clearly see what's theirs to
 play with and what's not.[1]

 In the middle range I could forsee a simple (read:
 inexpensive) system that allows your users to edit the
 existing content via the web such as...

 http://www.active-publisher.com
 http://www.yusasp.com/prj04.asp
 http://www.opencms.org/opencms/opencms/index.html
 http://www.fogcreek.com/
 http://www.zope.org/

 ...each page would probably need to be predefined to
 properly call includes and nav, as these aren't robust
 from
 a CMS standpoint, but affordable and easy for the end
 user
 to edit content within.

 At the high end, you could go with a site that's fully
 dynamic, including the rendering of your navigation based
 on the addition and organization of pages. The admins
 could
 have an interface to design a page template, the users
 could have a place to build a new page based on those
 aforementioned templates, and a place to organize the
 architecture so that the nav is built correctly. A bit
 expensive to implement but pretty much self-maintaining
 and
 easiest for the end user.

 Moreover, with newsletter articles, you're -- by
 definition
 -- describing a publishing environment. The site should
 have been built from the beginning with dynamic, flexible
 content snippets in mind, and the size (within reason)
 should be irrelevant to how the pages are rendered. The
 design should accomodate either incredibly flexible sizes
 of content, or article summaries with jump pages.

 [1] But all this aside, it seems that your biggest
 problem
 is the tool being used. Word creates the most bloated and
 funky code I've ever seen. FP is equally squirrely.
 GoLive
 isn't too bad, and the latest version plays nicely with
 server-side scripting technologies, such as ASP, JSP and
 CF, and also allows document versioning and
 collaboration.

 Hope my $.02 helps. Would love to continue this thread.

 /rg


> <snip>
> --- Janet Green <JGreen at desmoinesmetro.com> wrote:
> ... One of our internal departments has a website,
> > designed and now hosted by a local firm, which was
> > supposed to be easy for a non-HTML expert to go in and
> > make changes to using Front Page. The gal in charge of
> > updating the online newsletter portion of this site is
> > having trouble making each month's articles fit into
> the
> > nested table layout. One of the problems I pointed out
> to
> > the designers was the fact that their code is not
> > terribly tidy
> <snip>


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