Provision of offline editing and CMS

as opposed to online editing (by the client).

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

There seems to be regular requests in here from web designers who are looking for a simple content management system that would allow their clients to edit and manage their own sites without the need for complex implementation, set up, server requirements, database connections and future maintenance. Ther is one going on right now, [webmasterworld.com...]

Some of we web designers build small websites for start ups and clients that are "one off" jobs requiring some form of content management. These clients will probably disappear after the website is built. In other words there will be no ongoing relationship with many of them. They will not be local and the designer will probably never have met them. Most of the client's website requirements will have been defined by email and telephone.

One problem seems to be that most applications seem to concentrate on online editing rather than local editing with subsequent upload (as with Adobe Contribute). Online editing presents its own set of problems with security and future server upgrades that may cause the system to break down. I reckon that the first person who comes up with a simple, easy to use, low-cost solution that works similar to Contribute may become a very rich person.

This is how I would see it working. (Bear in mind that I am writing it from a user's requirement perspective and I am no expert so I am not sure what is possible and what is not.)

1. The solution would be an offline editor similar to Contribute. Offline editing should minimise potential security problems. It would not require all the facilities of Contribute and it would be even simpler and cheaper - say $20 to $100.

2. It would facilitate the download of the user's finished website from the Internet to their local PC. It would do this easily and include idiot proof instructions on how to do it.

3. It would interpret user editable areas that have been set up by the designer as agreed with the client.

4. It's interface would offer the website pages and editable areas in a simple WYSIWYG editor for the user to edit.

5. It would have a simple upload (FTP) system that could be easily set up by the user by following instructions on how to set up the FTP connection.

6. The designer and the user will probably be remote from each other. The key to all of this is that it should be easy for the designer to set this up and to instruct the client in how it should be used from a download, editing and upload perspective.

Any comments on this? Also does anyone know if a tool like this, other than Contribute, already exists?

[ergophobe]

I don't know. Tim Berners-Lee original vision for the web was that we would all be browsing with editors and if we had permissions we would just click on something and change it and I think as we move more to cloud computing, that vision is more likely to succeed. The problem is that dynamic scripts make editing non-content areas quite a bit more of a challenge.

I think the solution, long term, is something that makes it less apparent to the user that there is an online and an offline, that there's an admin screen and a viewing screen for each page. Admin screens will be for admins, not people writing and editing content.

We're headed there faster than you might think. Consider Google Docs and Google Gears that allow offline editing of word processor documents.

Gears + Wordpress is not aimed at offline editing - yet, but it has redistributed the web app in a sense. With Gears, WP is part on your hard drive and part on your server as it were.

The next step is for apps like Wordpress to get much better WYSIWYG editors and to have more of that capability work with Gears (or some similar system), so that the heavy weight of the editor is on your computer and doesn't have to be DLed every time you edit a page, but you also don't have concurrency problems because you're editing the document online in real time.

So what about NOW instead of some oft-delayed promise land? Who knows. It's still a lesser of two evils problem as I see it. CMSes are mostly a pain in the butt on so many levels, but then again they do facilitate certain types of tasks/sites in a way that Contribute can't.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Another problem with online CMSs is that they are generally designed to allow people to make major changes and basically to run a website through them. There is so much scope for problems for the website designers who install these. I know this from experience. I have one now where a client's hosting company have upgraded their version of PHP making my client's CMS unusable. I now have to deal with the client (who has not contacted me in two years) and who now wants me to fix it.

Personally I don't need this hassle and using present methods it will always be there. Millions of website owners Worldwide also do not need it. They only need to make occasional updates to some pages and some parts of pages. I just don't see the need for all this complexity, databases, version control, security concerns, etc.

So who is going to make a million developing my tool? :)

[ergophobe]

You! Hire a developer for $100,000 and sell 2,000 copies for 99 dollars.

>>Millions of website owners Worldwide also do not need it

Indeed. If you don't need comments, forums, multiple contributors, real-time inventory updates blah blah blah blah blah, you don't need Wordpress, drupal, joomla, xcart or whatever. They do what they do at such a cost in terms of hassle and maintenance. But if you need those capabilities, you need them. How many do?

I see the flip side of your complaint about broad access on the site my wife manages. It's a big CMS with a super complex permission structure. You can lock down anything and everything. But as soon as someone wants to do something at all unusual, you start racking up the bills because 20 people have to get involved.

p.s.
I'm in an anti-CMS mood today due to certain hassles this morning. Sometimes it just makes you want to pull your hair out. With static sites, only CSS has that ability!