Site That Allows Owners To Edit

Seeking help on this !

[austtr]

A website is to be developed for a regional consortium of 30 plus businesses. Each one has a set of pages describing their business, their products, prices, season dates etc.

Each business needs to keep prices and dates current, so they want to be able to edit a page themselves without having to go back to the webmaster each time.

I have heard that there are some tools available that allow a website to be setup with this capability.... they might even be freeware.

Does anyone have knowledge of what these tools are and where I can find them? All contributions welcomed.

[ukgimp]

Have a look here and see if this is what you are after

www.hotscripts.com/Perl/Scripts_and_Programs/News_Publishing/

You might be able to adapt some of the content management stuff also at hotcripts.

[TallTroll]

We've been doing some research into CMS software recently, and it seems to be a pretty mixed bag. On the one hand you've got free tools like Zope [zope.org], which permits you to do just about anything you want, providing that you either have access to Python scripting skills, or can use one of the pre-built tools successfully.

Hotscripts, Sourceforge etc are also full of CMS-type scripts of varying quality and utility (they mostly seem to be geared to a specific niche, which is great if you are in, or near, that niche, but not so flexible otherwise)

Or you can go for one of the big corporate systems, which will do just about everything you ever dreamed of, but for the £10k-ish (minimum) entry price, I'd want them to bring me my morning coffee, and massage me while I work. Fine if you are aiming at enterprise level clients, but overkill otherwise

Another thing that has bothered me about the majority of CMS systems is the general level of SE unfriendliness they exhibit.

Some are using ASP pages for example, which makes management a snap, and allows you to do nifty "time release" pages, but makes it harder for spiders to get the content, and less likely that even the ASP capable ones will scoop the whole site.

Others use proprietory database technology, with built-in web server software, and doesn't publish docs at all, but delivers content at the directory level (ie a page URL may look like www.example.com/cms/foo, which isn't what spiders are expecting. I have seen these sorts of pages with decent rankings, but it seems to be harder to achieve)

We found only one non open source tool that had seriously considered the search engine issue properly, and allowed you to publish docs like www.example.com/cms/foo/bar.html. It seems to be a general pattern that if you use CMS systems, you need to run a parallel project if you anyone to be able to FIND your lovely, up-to-date content

I'm not going to drop to any of the commercial tools, but you can sticky me for our impressions of them (which are ONLY our opinions, I must stress, based on our particular requirements)

[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 1:50 pm (utc) on Aug. 19, 2002]