[thelist] Custom CMS

Thu Mar 28 03:38:01 CST 2002

Ken Kogler wrote:

>This could get ugly, but bear with me:
>
>The University I work for is currently rolling it's old website over to
>a new one that was done by an outside firm. The problem we're running
>into is that we need to come up with some way of managing the content.
>
look bellow, but imho it's a perfect fit for zope.

>
>Here's the university's requirements:
> - set permissions on a page-by-page basis
>
I'm not sure you really want this, it would be so easier to have
somekind of role/permission based security. Define roles per group of
users, define permissions for different roles in different sections of
the site. But most probably not on a per page basis (altough it could be
made as well for particular cases).

>
> - allow fac/staff to use a client-side html editor (like FP or DW)
>
I guess you could use anything that uses ftp or webdav. Even better,
there are softs that lets you mount ftp to the filesystem as a virtual
drive. Users will see your site as another drive on their computer.

>- all pages must fit into pre-developed template
>
>This is going to be a nightmare to implement, and I want to find a
>better way. The university is basically saying "we want the fac/staff to
>be able to use FrontPage, but they can't be able to change the template"
>- short of writing some kind of upload script to parse out all the
>unnecessary code, I can't really come up with a way to do this. (The
>university is against that upload script idea, too... They just want
>people to map the live webspace to a drive letter and edit live).
>
There are quite different zope products that let's you do this : when
you upload an html file, everything between <body> is striped, the title
is extracted from the title tag, and the doc is ready for use within the
template of the site. If you don't like this way of doing it, simply use
zope builtin objects, and only put the needed content in those objects.

look at http://www.zope.org/Members/sf/HTMLDocument for a zope products
that does this (on ftp uploads/file creation, the content is
automagically converted)

>The other issue we run into is that we have the same content in
>different spots. The undergraduate admissions application, for example.
>It's the same for Incoming Freshmen and Transfer Students. But the pages
>they reside on are different, since the university is really big on this
>breadcrumb trail idea they've got... And they want the breadcrumbs to
>accurately reflect where the user is ("Incoming Students > Transfer >
>App" as opposed to "Incoming Students > Freshmen > App").
>
Here again you can use a zope "trick", called acquisition :

you put 'App' in 'Incoming students', and then it will be available in
both 'Transfer' and 'Freshmen' (in fact it is vaialble in any child
folder), *as if it was really there*, which means, the script will be
executed *in the context* where it is called. It's very powerfull.

> So the logical
>solution to that mess is to simply put the content in a database
>(they're running SQL Server 7 here) and have the 2 separate physical
>pages pull out the same content, which ties in to my next point
>nicely...
>
If you have the time to do this ;)

>If the content goes into a db, then I can simply build a web-based html
>editor (we're all using IE here, so I can force browser compatibility)
>to handle the basic requirements. All the fac/staff really needs to do
>is <p>, <a href>, <img>, and <ul>... Setting up a system like the
>article submission thingy on evolt should be more that sufficient.
>
If you have money, try the differents webbased editing tools (java), or
roll your own using Ms explorer dhtml components (IE 5+ only).

Look here for a complete list : http://www.bris.ac.uk/ISC/cms/ttw.html
Most of the time, those tools are piece of cake to implement, they
replace an html text area.

http://vsbabu.org/webdev/zopedev/ieeditor.html will give you some ideas
on what has been made to use mshtml editing tool with zope.

>So how do I convince The Powers That Be that an online web-based editor
>is 1,000 times better than letting users use FP? I need ammo, people.
>
Separating content and representation is king, everyone knows that :)

>Anyone out there ever had to custom build their own CMS before?
>
I never needed to custom build from scratch as I use zope as a basis, so
I don't build from nothing, but from a very powerfull server app. Imho
it's a more efficient way that all the php "crap" I managed to do before.

hth,

Philippe