Hi i'm creating a webpage for my school's newspaper/journalism club. to be honest i don't know if any of the club members have much html programming ability and when i finally publish this page, i don't want to have to teach them how to update the page themselves (i will still help i just don't want to have to update the homepage my self) so basically my question is: is there a simple way to create an html form(s) that can create an html webpage? and could it be made so it updates to multiple pages at once. Thanks!
oh also if it is not possible with html or html5 i'd appreciate it if you post which programming language it needs to be done in :)
basically what i want is a form for the title, one for the paragraph, maybe a couple for pictures and i want it to turn out in the same format every time.....
I guess you'd have to look at a CMS (content management system) like Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, ... (there are many many more out there)
These CMS let you create and update your pages in just a few clicks even without basic HTML knowledge!
Related
I've seen news sites (CNN, Fox News, etc.) use HTML files as their post content. For my blog, I currently use dynamic pages (e.g. www.example.com/post/?id=3).
I'm wondering if this is the correct way to go, mostly because AdSense won't accept /post/ for ads. Is this because it's just pulling up /post/ & not the id?
So basically, which way do you recommend? Thanks
It depends on the contend of your page. But basically the good way is to create easy to read links like:
http://example.com/drive-to-norway
It's because it's easy to read for people and before clicking the user knowns what it could be (instead for example: http://example.com/id=3)
Some bigger pages do not use that convention because they for example sell a lot of similar items and having named, unique links without any numbering isn't possible/easy for them. Like I wrote at the beginning - it depends on content.
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)
As a side project I tutor grandparents and other computer novices in Computer & Internet 101, from physically using a mouse to dealing with e-mail/searching/etc. Web development isn't really my area of focus - I do have reasonable HTML/CSS/Javascript etc skills, so I can throw together a decent-looking simple, static site - but occasionally I get asked to put together extremely simple websites for these people, that they can update themselves; that is, edit text-based content without giving Grandpa a heart attack by making him come face-to-face with HTML/Javascript.
I've waded through a mile-long list of CMS software - largely culled from the many other similar questions on SO - but they've all got something ruling it out: hosted, restricts the design (can't use w/existing CSS, looks "Word-press-y", etc), not free/FOSS, etc. I wonder if "CMS" is even the right word for what I'm looking for. What I need is a simple text editor for the client: that is, something that will give the client a text box of some variety, let them edit it, and update the content with that info. They can't mess with navigation, add new pages, change anything other than text. If it was really fancy, they could upload a picture.
I was planning to do this just with a couple of password-protected php forms, but thought I'd ask if there's anything already out there that might provide this functionality? Any suggestions on building my own version of this, in PHP or something else?
What I'm really interested in is:
1) the simplicity/customize-ability of the admin interface (or lack of admin interface, if the client could somehow edit directly in the page), and
2) ease of set up for me (not getting paid much if at all for this, don't want to wade through three million plugin options to figure out how to get some unwieldy, high learning-curve framework to do what I want).
Try pulsecms.
Here is another very simple CMS that has JQuery and modernizr , HTML5 Boilerplate and TinyMCE.
I have my wife setup with Windows LiveWriter
http://explore.live.com/windows-live-writer?os=other
This means that she just builds her articles as if she is using a word processor (almost exactly the same) and then just uploads the article to her blog. I use Blogengine.net to host the blog on a Godaddy hosting solution.
Blogengine comes with built in support for LiveWriter and only required that you input the address, username and password in.
I understand this is an old post, but i hope someone find this of interest.
You could give the users the instruction to upload text files to the site, and the have the HTLM/PHP/ASP pages load the context of such .ts files.
Each web page should have a specific named .txt file associated.
I just started learning HTML and CSS, with no knowledge on other languages such as javascript, Php, and so forth. Websites like Refdesk.com boast fresh content everyday, there has to be someway they are able to have new content everyday other then changing it by hand. Some Google searches came up with nothing but RSS feeds.
How is this done?
Thanks for the helpful answers, it answers half of my question, but does this also mean that the owner would have to manually add the webpage each day for new content, or say add in the content for a few days and have them displayed day after day automatically?
Most dynamic websites derive their page content from a database. Change the content in the database, and the content on the pages changes to follow suit.
Likely they have some form of content management system which allows non-technical users to update the site. In some systems, the content manager itself can get quite advanced. Here's a description of the latest version of the one used at the BBC, CPS, which drives the many BBC websites and more.
They most probably use a database where they store the content and the newest entries are retrieved from this database and displayed. This requires a server side language like PHP, Java, Python.
The HTML is generated dynamically.
The answers about databases combined with a server-side language like PHP are pretty good and very direct, but depending on how new you are to web development they might not be conceptual enough.
The first thing you need to understand is that a database is a collection of tables - each like any you might be familiar with in excel.
For example, one table in your database might be named "daily_links" and it might have two columns, one named "Date", and one named "Link". So every time you want to publish a new link, you just make a new row.
So now you are half way there.
Now what the server-side scripting language is able to do is to go to the database, look at your table "daily_links" and bring back each all the information that it found there.
From there it can do anything with that information like make a new anchor tag in html for each row it found, and give it an href of the data found in the column "Link".
That is rough idea in (very) general terms.
I hope that is easy to understand.