I would like to create some electronic form solution for SharePoint 2013, I am trying to explore some different option aside from InfoPath 2013, can you please recommend something alternative or better solution?
Here is a good list of alternatives to InfoPath by Mark Jones: http://list.ly/list/EKk-infopath-forms-alternatives
Full disclosure: I work for PDF Share Forms and we are featured in this list.
Choosing the right forms product can be a tough decision and you need to figure out what functionality you are really looking for. Main advantage of PDF Share Forms is that you can reuse existing forms/documents as form templates and potentially save loads of time because there is no need to design from scratch every time. Also, in the process you get a tangible document - PDF form that is not just bunch of data in your SharePoint. It is an international standard that is not going away anytime soon.
Learn more here: http://www.pdfshareforms.com/
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I recently started learning about drupal integration and because I wanted to learn how to create sites that I give to people with no html experience who want to be able to update their site. Through my research I learned that Drupal is the best supported CMS. It really does have a lot of nice features and accomplishes the job, but it almost has too many features for what I want.
I'm assuming there is some kind of open-source software for
I am an aspiring web developer trying to build my portfolio/gain experience. What I've been trying to do is build sites for clients that I can lose complete contact with--so when their store hours change and they have no HTML experience, I get emails about updating their site.
I figure there are three approaches: (tell me if there are more)
I write a php app that allows them to edit their site
I use a CMS (Drupal) to let them edit their site
I write scripts that embed text files formatted with {white-space: pre;}
I've so far implemented each method on 3 different sites, and they all work with drawbacks. I would prefer an open-source alternative to writing my own app for stability/security. Drupal seems more oriented towards allowing multiple users to add content, whereas I only want one user update existing content. The third option works well for computer-literate clients, but anyone who can navigate onto their server to change the file could probably figure out how to update the site without any of these approaches.
To sum up my problem, can anyone tell me the term I am looking for? Content Management System refers to the site framework for sites with a growing number of content posts (correct me if I'm wrong). What is the term for the site framework for editing sites with predefined but editable pages? If you could please tell me that, then I can at least research this question on my own. Otherwise, if you have any advice or solutions, they are much appreciated!
Thanks
user1470887, you've asked a great question. The answer, unfortunately, is that too many of the existing CMS products overlook this use case. It doesn't have an exact name as far as I know.
The term "in-place editing" describes one version of this (user clicks text on web page, block of text becomes a form, user edits contents and presses submit button, new text is sent to webserver and saved, and the form becomes normal text again). But I gather you would be happy with anything that lets them edit-existing but not create-new.
I'm also guessing you don't want to build your own Drupal module or commission one.
I do not know Drupal well enough to know whether there's a Drupal module that meets your needs. I'd recommend a careful search, though, especially if you are already somewhat familiar with Drupal. (Yes, Drupal can seem like too much CMS at times.)
However ... if you can't find a Drupal solution or want an alternative to Drupal, MODX Revolution does have an answer: set it up and then install Bob Ray's NewsPublisher add-on. It will put an "edit" button on pages which a user has the right to edit, but not on pages where they don't have edit rights. (And of course users will only be able to edit the title, body content etc - not the entire page.)
Bob Ray has literally written the book on MODX (MODX: The Official Guide). I was able to successfully adapt NewsPublisher to a project last year similar to what you have described, with predefined pages that the user would only need to edit over time. The latest NewsPublisher version, untested by me, is said to be further improved and can now be styled much more easily using CSS. That should allow you to give your users a customised and consistent interface.
As andmag also notes, MODX is a very flexible system for web developers focused on the presentation layer. It has the best templating system going.
I'll recomend you to try MODX. It gives you big flexibility to run your php or html code.
This is not a direct code question, however, I think it may be useful. After google-ing for a while, I can't find a definitive answer....
A while back, I built a rudimentary CMS for shcool. Image upload, gallery, text, a basic captcha, etc. Basically a blog that you could upload images to. My quesiton is this:
Could any of you clever ducks tell me what features a robust, solid, home-made CMS should contain? I don't want to make a super fancy pants sort of site, but I do want to flesh it out a little. My current job is in Sharepoint design, and I don't want to lose any of the PHP skills that course taught me.
Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
Well.. The best product is a product that reaches the requirements of the customer.
But I would say:
Dynamic menu
Dynamic pages
Different type of pages - front page, posts, lists, media, gallery
Secure back end
Dynamic user configuration
A install script
Template editor, where you can define modules
Maybe a offline post editor, with a up-loader (Drag a .doc file in a folder, and the file is automatically added as a post on the page)
We are trying to make a document-managemnet / knowledge management portal using Plone 4. We would like a forms / structured data feature in our webapp with posibility of defining forms through the web, having workflows using these forms and being able to create reports from them (preferably in some format that facilitates simple and nice looking or skinnable printouts).
Any pointers to modules, documentation and/or literature would be great. Thanks.
Dexterity in combination with collections for reporting should get you what you need.
http://plone.org/products/dexterity
PloneFormGen is a good solution for through the web creation of standalone forms but as soon as you need your form to be workflowed, reviewed inside plone or later edited and updated then a "Content Type" is normally the most appropriate way to model this inside an CMS. Dexterity is the recommended way to build content types going forward. It has the ability to create and edit content types through the web.
For more indepth information of developing a Dexterity based solution see http://plone.org/products/dexterity/documentation/manual/developer-manual
Archetypes would be an alternative way to create content types.
Collections can be used for basic through the web reports. To make this work on the new fields in your content types you'd need to make the fields usable inside collections which I'll leave out of this explanation. For more advanced reports I'd suggest a simple BrowserView which lets you use any python you want to compose your report.
The add-on http://plone.org/products/uwosh.pfg.d2c product with PloneFormGen, is going to be the best fit for your situation.
uwosh.pfg.d2c creates content objects from your PloneFormGen form submissions. You can then use it with placeful workflows to give you a custom workflow on the submission.
If you'd rather not use placeful workflows, it also allows you to specify the content type it'll save the form to so you can have a different content type, with a different workflow on every form.
Dexterity would work too, but the TTW tool is not nearly where PloneFormGen is.
Simply: http://plone.org/products/ploneformgen
I need advice/suggestions.
At my place of work - we have a large data set.
We would like to server the data up as editable html pages.
(Its mostly lists of simple text)
We would like to add data, change it's order, update text etc...from the editable pages.
It has to have a pretty low bar for usability and WYSIWYG is a must.
The folks who will edit are not programmers by a long shot.
We are not sure Wiki will work.
It might have to do - but not sure.
Changes have to be tracked and written back into the DB
I am thinking some kind of open source CMS might work?
Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal - something that can get us up and running pretty quickly.
I really am open to suggestions - not sure where to begin on this one.
Thanks all
If you don't have someone available right now with expertise with a specific CMS, it will not be quick to set up at all. One good reason is that you'd have to import all of your existing data into whatever form the CMS supports: this is a task for someone who has done it before. On the other hand, if you can pull that off, some of the built in WYSIWYG editors are quite easy to use, with some systems you get versioning and author information for free etc. I'm speaking mostly with the eZ Publish CMS in mind, although it's probably true for other systems.
I would make a simple CMS site that uses the Ajax control toolkit HTML Editor and perform updates to the database on postback.
Here is the link to the Editor example
http://www.asp.net/ajax/ajaxcontroltoolkit/Samples/HTMLEditor/HTMLEditor.aspx
CMS Made Simple (http://www.cmsmadesimple.org) is very easy to set up and use. You do need to understand xhtml and javascript for the theme whacking, but once it's set up it has been trouble free. See my http://www.ConvinceProject.com as an example. It is MUCH easier to use than Drupal and appears to be more stable. I've had Drupal crash when installing security updates to modules, for example. It gives you full access to the header metatags, has fully integrated php and smarty tags, seems quite complete.
AFA importing, this is all mysql-based, although it can use others. If you have a web-whacking coder, pages can be 'scraped' and stuffed if it's more than cut and paste will do.
Lots of us can do it, it's not hard.
If I understand you correctly, it seems like you just need a web-based GUI for editing your DB. Honestly it would probably be faster to just roll your own in the language most familiar to you. There are many fine WYSIWYG editors out there that you can wrap around a text field, such as http://ckeditor.com/.
On the the other hand if you're hoping to solve this problem with DB skills and not do any web dev it may indeed be easier to find a simple CMS. ModX and SimpleCMS comes to mind. Joomla, Drupal and WP all come with so many out of the box features you'd have to strip out - look for something that starts fairly simple. Drupal in the right hands could do this, it has tools for importing/exporting to external DBs but the learning curve is pretty steep. Be aware that some CMSes do strange things with entry data...you may have to look for a text field inside a stored array (Drupal) instead of stored as a straight text field.
I am looking for a nice framework for developing a GUI builder Application. We have an application where 100Os of custom data entry forms and their print formats are required and each client will need some modifications on these. We have a developed a product using java based open source templatnig frameworks so that the layout and field definition are stored in database and rendered dynamically to the user. We also have an appication to design these forms but cannot do visual design.
Now I am trying to make a Visual Form Designer application for generating these forms. Can any one suggest some open source frameworks than can be used? Can I use Eclipse Visual Editor? Or is it better to develop some kind of parser for HTML using AntLR and then parse the HTML output from already existing GUI builders like Dreamweaver to get the desired output?
Thanks and Regards,
-- Kannan
Oooh, great question!
I wouldn't know any readily availble framework that you can use. Depending on your needs however, I think rolling your own shouldn't be too hard.
First of all, you probably wouldn't want to give the users too much freedom. Freedom only gives them the opportunity to mess things up and make the resultant forms hard to use. I think from your description that the fields are pre-defined, so that the user only needs to customize which fields appear on a given form, and in what order. Order can be a simple thing like top-to-bottom. Some semi-intelligent automatic layouting could be used to conserve screen space. Adding a feature to group fields together would probably also be useful, and grouping would lead to some kind of standard "group" widget.
Accepting simplified functionality like this, you don't really need the flexibility of a full gui editor. A couple of listviews, maybe a property sheet and a preview window will be enough to give your users the functionality they need.
Of course, this only holds for screen forms. Print forms may be trickier to layout, as people may want to cram as many fields as possible into very little space so the entire form can fit on a single page or something. I really don't have any suggestions for you there, but maybe a similar "simplified" approach with some intelligent auto-layouting could work.
Overall, my advice would be: Keep It Simple! (S... ;)