WYSIWYG editor for SSI / Includes

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WYSIWYG editor for SSI / Includes

Need to allow non-technical end users access to subset of pages

wormtowndj

10:54 pm on Jul 29, 2009 (gmt 0)

I mostly code in Textpad, though I do have Dreamweaver. But I have no budget for 5 or 6 Contribute licenses just so I can use Templates.

It's easy enough to pull the code that should be updatable out of a page and put it into an SSI or PHP include file, which would allow me to give subsets of a page to the team who will be updating it. But I can't find a free WYSIWYG editor that will not automatically insert the <html> and <body> tags upon Save. Oddly enough, when included back in, those files still work great, even though I now have 2 </body> tags in the middle of my <html>. The page works great, but I doubt it will validate.

Can anyone suggest a good alternative here, which will still promote clean code? I need to allow these very non-technical users to update their content. It's not a database driven site, and I'd really rather not allow them the ability to touch the site headings, sidebars, etc.

Thanks in advance.

bill

4:58 am on Jul 30, 2009 (gmt 0)

Which WYSIWYG editors have you tried that haven't worked?

wormtowndj

1:41 pm on Jul 30, 2009 (gmt 0)

I tried Seamonkey, Kompozer, and Amaya, with the same results. Each one inserts the barebones tags - they surround my include file with:

I'd love to find something that will allow a receptionist to do a WYSIWYG edit of an include file, and turn that into simple html tags ( <h1>, <p>, <li>, etc...nothing fancy). As I said, the include still inexplicably works, even with the invalid tags, but I hate to see all those errant tags inside my source code.

wormtowndj

3:31 pm on Jul 30, 2009 (gmt 0)

Well, I answered my own question. Within Amaya, if you perform a "Save As", and select "text/xml", it retains the formatting tags, but does not insert the surrounding html tags in the file. But you can edit the file and change heading levels, colors, etc. within a WYSIWYG environment. Looks like Amaya will work great for my purposes.

Thanks.

wormtowndj

9:36 pm on Jul 30, 2009 (gmt 0)

I was overanxious with my last post. This does not work after all. If anyone has any ideas for a Windows based WYSIWYG editor to manipulate code fragments (SSI), please let me know.

Thanks.

webtress

1:33 am on Aug 18, 2009 (gmt 0)

Take a look at html kit, there is a WYSIWYG mode, I've not used it in WYSIWYG mode so can't say if its good bad or ugly but as a text editor its good and won't add a bunch of code to your pages,

wormtowndj

5:18 pm on Aug 18, 2009 (gmt 0)

Thanks for following up. HTML-Kit looks good as a sophisticated text editor, but its WYSIWYG capabilities seem to have been an afterthought...they call it a "Prototype Pad", and it doesn't even allow you to browse around a site to add a link. You can paste or type in a link, but then I'd have to teach my users about relative URLs, and I'm back where I started...they don't want anything they'll have to troubleshoot.

I still haven't found a good solution, so any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.

4serendipity

5:46 pm on Sep 16, 2009 (gmt 0)

Perhaps you can attack this issue from a different angle and create a web-based application to accomplish your needs.

Using a package like tinymce would get most of the heavy lifting done for you, leaving mostly just some rather simple file handling left.

wormtowndj

4:58 pm on Sep 21, 2009 (gmt 0)

Thanks...I believe TinyMCE might be the answer. But for the life of me, I can't find in the documentation how to accomplish the file handling. I assume I need to create a TinyMCE page which will read in an existing file (the file that is included elsewhere), and allow a user to modify and resave that file. The file could be as simple as this:

<h1>What's New</h1>
<p>9/21 - new item today</p>

So, can you point me to documentation which will help me to read a file in and allow saving to the same file? Thanks.

4serendipity

8:17 pm on Sep 23, 2009 (gmt 0)

After a short search I didn't find much in the way of simple TinyMCE documentation, but I did find a nice guide on using CKeditor:

[docs.fckeditor.net...]

As you can see, the markup from the editor is simply submitted to a post variable. Writing this to a file is a straightforward task if you have a reasonable grasp of php or another scripting language.

Of course, you'd also want to make sure that the edit pages require some sort of authentication.

While the amount of effort required to get this solution up and running wouldn't be too great, if might be just as easy to install a lightweight CMS that could accomplish your goals and more.