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Hello I got a website with around 5-6 pages (plain html). There are areas in these pages where I need to update occassionally. Is there any free / opensource CMS to maintain these editable areas of HTML page.
Thanks
Perch is excellent for small sites.
At its very simplest, Perch allows you to replace static content in an HTML file with placeholders. A simple GUI then allows you to edit those placeholder values for individual pages. So, for example, if you have a file containing this chunk of markup:
<h1>My site</h1>
you can change that to:
<h1><?php perch_content('Main heading'); ?></h1>
and you'll then be able to edit 'Main heading' through the GUI. Most CMS apps work in a similar way, but Perch is the first I've come across that does very little else, which is a huge plus for small projects.
I haven't used Perch for a while, and I'm sure they've added some features since I last did, but I'd still recommend you give it a try. It's cheap, too.
I think couchcms is a pretty good open source alternative to the likes of cushycms and perch
I recommend cushy
http://www.cushycms.com/
http://drupal.org/ is very popular. Many people also use Wordpress - http://wordpress.org. Also try googling "simple cms".
The answer will obviously be dependent on the requirements of the software and the capabilities of your server.
You should also check out opensourcecms.com. You can try out various cms's there until you find one you like.
For a five-page website, Drupal is probably overkill; I'd say Wordpress is good enough (just define a page for each page of the website, copy and paste your content, choose a theme, and you're done). (You would want to either use the blogging features of WP to take full advantage of it, though.)
If for some reason you really want to try out Drupal but don't want to invest a lot of time into figuring it out (it does take some ... well, a lot ... of time to figure out right out of the box), and you're not in a big hurry, you can wait a bit until it's possible to try out the new Drupal Gardens hosted CMS system (currently in beta). (You need a beta key to try it. Sign up for the beta on the site and then wait for your key.)
Since your most likely a programmer I would recommend github's very own Jekyll:
Here are some sites powered by it:
https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/wiki/sites
As a bonus you can use Github to provide you free hosting (your site will be a public repository that only you can edit).
Have you tried using mut8? They have pretty alright features.
http://mut8.me
Related
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.
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I'm looking to develop a custom PDF viewer for an iPad, which has features like:
bookmarks
search
deep linking
zoom
jump to specific page
Does anyone know a code solution similar to this? I'm currently looking at Ghostscript but am having a problem finding other options.
For a simple and effective PDF viewer, you can now (iOS 4.0+) use the QuickLook framework:
QLPreviewController *previewController = [[QLPreviewController alloc] init];
previewController.dataSource = self;
previewController.delegate = self;
previewController.currentPreviewItemIndex = indexPath.row;
[self presentModalViewController:previewController animated:YES];
[previewController release];
You need to link against QuickLook.framework and #include <QuickLook/QuickLook.h>
For anything more complex, just grab the excellent PSPDFKit.
I've developed a custom reader like this which I've used for a handful of projects for clients. Search & Highlight was by far the most difficult, followed by text selection. Keeping memory usage low for large PDF's is tricky too.
I cant share my source. But here's someone who has a free library that looks promising:
http://mobfarm.eu/fastpdfkit
https://github.com/mobfarm/FastPdfKit
(it doesn't look as if the source code is available?)
Here is a nice example of a pdf reader on github. It does not do the advanced things (like text search), but it might be good as a starting place. Seems to do OK with large pdfs, so maybe the performance is not too bad.
You could port Xpdf or the forked Poppler to iOS and use their rendering capabilities as well as retrieving information such as bookmarks and URI links from the PDF for use in your application.
There is a payed option named http://pspdfkit.com/
I have been looking at the example and it seams to work the way I was hoping to find some code example
http://www.labnol.org/software/ipad-pdf-reader-apps/13807/
Update: I can't find any PDF component/library for iOS, which doesn't surprise me. So here's a crazy alternative (so crazy it just might work): Write your app in C#/.Net using MonoTouch, and incorporate the free .Net library iTextSharp. I have no idea if this would work or not.
Another idea might be to incorporate a web service (running on a server somewhere) that will convert your PDF into HTML for you. Your server component can be written in any language, which expands your PDF-component options considerably. And the things you want to do in your bullet points would be a lot easier to implement yourself with HTML.
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I'm on a project where we're going to be sending HTML emails. I've done dozens of projects where we send plaintext emails but for some unknown reason, I've never had to do HTML emails.
I "grew up" with tables. I used to use them for layout development. Then CSS came along with its "layers" as we called them back then, and I changed my ways pretty rapidly. By 2002, I wasn't using tables for layouts at all.
We're almost a decade on and I've been writing pretty good code consistently. I'm now faced by something quite terrifying: writing bad code on purpose. I'm not sure if my mind or fingers will allow it.
So instead of starting by writing bad code, can I write my emails like I would with any other design-build-out: with beautiful divs and CSS, and then use something evil to convert it all out? I realise this might cause issues with background images (of which there may be a couple), but I'm sure I can man-up enough to "fix" those.
I should add that we will have a number of dynamic emails being generated and a newsletter-sender. Ideally this should be something I can plug onto the end of that process so emails get generated in "standards mode", then flown through Mordor to come out the other side as beastly 90's HTML.
There is no way to autmatically turn css and div based HTML pages into working tables that work in emails.
And you probably already know normal CSS style tag is not working in webmail like gmail and hotmail.
But most email clients support embedded css, yes I know its not something you would like to do in any normal page but for email its the only way to avoid having to use font tags.
Here is a page with some of the css and what clients it works in
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/
But for layout, tables is the only stable way to go for any more complex layout, especially if you like multiple columns or borders but my advice after 10 year of coding for emails is to try to keep it as simple as possible, think typewriter style letters with a few images, a header and footer and no more, that almost always work.
Try premailer.. http://premailer.dialect.ca/ its written in rb.. if you want the same in php.. then try https://gist.github.com/1204853
There's a tool called Premailer which might be a step in the right direction.
You still can't use divs and floats but it at least alleviates the need for writing your styles inline. You just write your styles in a <style> tag and it'll inline-ify them for you.
https://github.com/alexdunae/premailer
found out something http://www.pelagodesign.com/sidecar/emogrifier/ .. its written is php.. and its awesome... :)
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I'm just looking through some of the webmaster stats that Google provides, and noticed that the most common links to our website are to some research articles that we've put up in PDF format. The articles are also available on the site in HTML.
I was looking at the sites (mostly forums and blogs) which link to these articles and was thinking that none of the people clicking the links would actually get to see our website, and that we're giving something away for free and not even getting some page views in return.
I thought that maybe I could change my server settings to redirect external requests to these files to the HTML version. This way, the users still get the same content (albeit in an unexpected format), and we'd get these people to see our website and hopefully explore it some more. Requests coming from my site should be let through to the PDF. Though I don't know how to set this up just yet (keep an eye out for a follow-up question here), I'm sure this is technically possible. The only question is: is that a good idea?
What would you consider the downsides of redirecting traffic from external sources such that they see our site, not just get our content? Do they outweigh the benefits?
The only other alternate option I can see is to make our branding and URL much more visible in the PDF files themselves. Any thoughts?
Hopefully your PDFs are equally branded so that visitors will feel compelled to search further in your website. That might be just as important as having visitors briefly stop-over at your website.
I'm usually opposed to all such redirects as harmful to usability. However, in this case a basic content-type negotiation takes place and this might be acceptable. However, make sure that this doesn't break downloads of the PDF documents for users who might have disabled their referers in the browser (I do this, for one).
Sure you could cut them off, but there is a bigger issue at play: Why aren't these people finding you before they are finding these moocher sites?
Possible reasons are:
a) they did find your site, but not the content they were looking for, even though its obviously there, or
b) your site never appeared in their search results.
You may want to consider a site redesign in order to address those concerns before cutting off what appears to be a reliable source of information about your target audience (for you and the people who get your PDFs from elsewhere).
In the meantime, I would suggest you allow the traffic, add a cover page to all of your PDFs that are basically a full-page ad for your site and then enlarge the font on the copyright section of each page so the authorship is very prominent. You have a built in audience now, they just don't know it yet. Show them where the source is.
Eventually, the traffic will come to you and know you as a reliable source for that information.
I would do it. It's your site and your data.
The hot-linkers are essentially 'guests' and you can make the rules for your guests.
If they don't like it, they don't have to link.
I would add a page at the beginning of each article with info about the website, the current article and links to other articles on your website.
I find it more convenient than redirecting the user to a page on your website(that's annoying). Most people right click and download PDF files, what would that do when your redirect ;)
I think the proper thing to do in this situation is to leave the redirects. Here's why:
There's nothing worse than expecting to go somewhere/get something and not getting it (the negative impact would outweigh the positive.)
Modify your content to add a footer such as: "like what you saw, we've got more, check us out at www.url.com"
If your content is good, users will check out your website. These are the visitors you want, they're more likely to stick around and provide your site with value (whatever that may be.) Those that you've coerced may provide you with an extra click or two, but you will likely not see any value given back to your site.
Look at other successful sites that give something away for free: Joel on Software, Seth Godin, Tim Ferriss, 37Signals. The long term will provide better, more consistent value than the short term.
If you go for this solution, see if redirecting to the HTML version also changes the file name displayed by the browser if somebody used 'save as' on the link, else an HTML page would be saved with a pdf extension. Apart from that, I can see no reason why you shouldn't do it.
As an alternative, see if you can add a link to your site to the top of the pdf file. This way they are reminded where it comes from even if someone else sent it to them by email.
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I need to create a historical timeline starting from 1600's to the present day. I also need to have some way of showing events on the timeline so that they do not appear cluttered when many events are close together.
I have tried using Visio 2007 as well as Excel 2007 Radar Charts, but I could not get the results I wanted. the timeline templates in Visio are not great and using Radar charts in Excel leads to cluttered data.
Are there any other tools or techniques I could use to create these?
#Darren:
The first link looks great. Thanks! The second link did not work in Firefox and was rendered as ASCII. It opened up fine in IE.
And yes, this is for the end users. So I want it to look as presentable as possible, if you know what I mean.
Thanks again!
SIMILIE Timeline would probably suit your needs.
http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/
Timeline .NET: http://www.codeplex.com/timelinenet
Oh, i guess i should ask... for personal use or for display to end users? that might change what i would suggest, but this could work for internal purposes too i suppose.
Lifehacker has a good overview and tutorial of SIMILIE Timeline. They seem to like it quite a bit.
If you need a timeline from RSS Feeeds give xTimeline a try. I just used it
http://lifehacker.com/software/rss/create-a-timeline-from-rss-feeds-with-xtimeline-283098.php
#Pascal this page? http://tools.mscorlib.com/timeline/Default.aspx. If it's looking like ascii maybe look for a js error, but that renders on my system fine. If all else fails, it's a decent js library by the MIT team as it is, so you could wire up your own implementation
I also recommend Simile Timeline... I just implemented a webpage that uses it and JQuery and produces fantastic results. The downside is that you need to implement it through some html page, hook it up with the js and create some xml files, so it probably won't do for a presentational tool.
http://infosthetics.com/ is a good data visualization blog, maybe you find something there. Also check flowingdata.com
For webbased timelines, there is also:
circavie: http://flowingdata.com/2007/10/25/create-share-and-embed-custom-timelines-with-circavie/
dipity (looks killer): http://flowingdata.com/2008/08/18/tell-stories-with-interactive-timelines-from-dipity/
You can used this great timeline tool built with JavaScript.
You can download it for free here: http://timeline.verite.co/#examples