[thelist] Do I need a CMS

[Chris Harrington]

Hershel,

I had a similar task last year, with sections and subsections accessing
training content which was originally written in Word. I built for my
client an XML/XSLT driven site. The Word material was also converted to
XML. Anyway, the site menus and training content were dynamically generated
from the XML. There was also role based filtering of the content. There was
no problem doing this on the fly, although for a very heavily used site I
might consider a batch conversion to HTML.  I would say that in your case a
CMS is overkill, but a CMS is something which you can grow into.  And with
a CMS, you can edit the content on-line after the batch conversion from Word.

This year I extended my XML/XSLT based page rendering to support on-line
browser-based editing, previewing, and publishing. So it has basically
evolved into a CMS. Is is geared more towards sites with complex
multi-level templates.


At 09:03 PM 6/13/2002 +0200, you wrote:
>I am building a site now with an Articles section.  This Articles section
>will contain the approx 1000 articles the site owner has written in MS Word.
>I have a utility to convert them (en masse) to HTML and I am writing a Perl
>script to strip off everything from these HTML files but the actual article
>text.  The articles are divided into categories and some of the categories
>are divided into subcategories.
>
>My question is what do people think of my writing a simple CGI Perl script
>(and an Access database) to handle producing (in real time) category,
>sub-category and actual article pages?  I'll just keep pointers in the
>database to all the files and then output article pages with the desired
>HTML look before and after the article.  Does anyone think I need something
>more sophisticated?
>
>The site owner writes articles for different publications occasionally and
>so there will be more articles to add, but I don't think any real volume of
>them.  If there was one a week I would be surprised.  To add new articles, I
>could just use the same semi-automated process of convert, strip and add to
>the database.
>
>I am wondering if I am missing any functionality here that might be useful.
>This is my first time building a site of this type.
>
>Thanks,
>Hershel
>
>PS: Anybody know what happened to cgi-list at jann.com?
>
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Chris Harrington
Active Interface, Inc.
www.intrasight.com
Ph: 412-901-1184
Fax: 412-799-0927