"Online Page Editing" Please Advise

[chocobogo]

I was wondering weather any of you guys could help me with this matter.
What I am trying to do is to develop a system whereas I can edit what is actually on my site whilst looking at it online instead of having to edit the HTML and upload each time.
The reason I need to do this is that some customers that I do websites for want a way to be able to change the information on their site without having to go into the HTML editing side as they do not have HTML knowledge.
What is the best way to do this, because obviously it needs to be secure otherwise anyone who visits the site can change the information and that wouldnt be practical!

I await hearing your advice

Cheers

[korkus2000]

What server-side language do you have available? You can easily do this having content fields pulling from a database. They probably won't be changing the design so having an admin section that is password protected for this is not that hard.

[DaveN]

have a look at macromedia contribute for over the shelf packages,

or as korkus say something like asp or php will do

DaveN

[chocobogo]

I think ASP is available,
So how could I go about setting this up.
I have a template in HTML that I use and all I need to do is to set up a system where you can change the text on the site itself

[brotherhood of LAN]

Folks might hunt me down for saying this, but the most recent version of Frontpage has a fairly simple way of setting something like this up.

You can password protect the area and create an area to add/delete/modify records from an MS Access database.

It takes about 15 minutes to set up, and your server requires FP extensions. Probably not the best solution but a quick one!

RE them not knowing HTML....
I'm using PHP so I dont know the ASP alternative, but say they typed in a few paragraphs of information...you can swap the line breaks for <p> tags for instance, or if they put a * before a word it would make it bold, that sort of thing.

[duckhunter]

Frontpage server extensions is probably the best way to do it because you are going to run into security issues where the IUSR_Server Account will not have permission to update the files in the web unless you specifically grant them and I would advise against that.

I'm not a big fan of Frontpage but it does have it's uses and this might be one of them.