Kompozer - Pat
SeaMonkey - Adrian
The application offers a free, integrated editing solution that works with WebDAV. It's the current, open source incarnation of the long-running Netscape application suite, so it seems to have an established developer community.
(SeaMonkey is the project name for the old Netscape and later Mozilla “Composer.” Composer is the editing component of the SeaMonkey application suite.)
It's very simple to use, and would likely be easy to teach to content administrators. The user loads a page he or she wants to modify using the SeaMonkey browser, hits CTRL/COMMAND + E to go into edit mode, makes changes in design or source view, then selects File → Publish.
If the user is WebDAV-enabled for the directory he or she is connecting to then the server will allow SeaMonkey to save the file over the existing one.
Here's a nice article about WebDAV editing with SeaMonkey, http://paulhammant.com/blog/post-wiki-content-management-with-WebDAV.html
One question concerns our desire to isolate parts of the page to prevent them from being edited.
The SeaMonkey solution could work if we modified our content management architecture so that the content section for each page is a simple include (i.e. individual pages are containers that call a separate content file, but requesting the content file in your browser does not call the template), and WebDAV-enabled only the directory containing the content files.
SeaMonkey can be downloaded at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey
Contribute - Jen
(Salve Regina uses this - we can contact them)
April 25
We need to see what parts of FrontPage people are using so we can evaluate what they will need
Here are the stats for the htt pages1):
| Total Pages | 39257 |
| Webbot tags | 2511 |
| ConfirmationField | 83 |
| HitCounter | 23 |
| ImageMap | 12 |
| Include | 102 |
| Outline | 1 |
| PhotoAlbum | 18 |
| SaveResults | 436 |
| TimeStamp | 174 |
| Validation | 1382 |
FrontPage Forms
NVu could never be our sole solution, because it does not support sftp or webdav. On the other hand, depending on how we use Xythos, NVu could work well in certain circumstances. We can set up index pages on our own servers that include content via http. We could then use Xythos to farm out responsibility for certain includes. The index page would call in content from the pages stored in Xythos. The individual content providers would be able to edit the includes, and only the includes, using whatever tool they like. If the Xythos drive is mounted, NVu will open an include as if it were a local document. In that case, Xythos offers a relatively straightforward editing environment for the uninitiated. It sounds complicated, but it's quite easy in practice, and I have tested it with success using PHP for the includes. By the same token, any of the other tools we are considering can presumably work in the same way, so the only things to recommend NVu in particular are cost (free) and intuitive simplicity. I'm not sure that it's a net simplification to introduce a tool that is only a partial solution, but it's hard to beat free. NVu update: Some brief testing of the above hypothesis uncovered a number of pesky difficulties. NVu can open and edit files in the Xythos “finder” but the filenames did not show up correctly in NVu. NVu did not want to allow me to edit files with .inc extensions and there did not seem to be any place to change that. By default, NVu adds <html>, <head>, <title>, and <body> tags to any document with an .htm extension. Although this feature can be overridden, it would be tedious to deal with it in practice. I think we can safely exclude NVu from our serious consideration. –Kevin
Amaya is very interesting but ultimately inappropriate for our needs, I believe. It connects to the server by a highly idiosyncratic “http PUT” method that is, by the W3C's own admission, not supported by many servers. Because of this we cannot easily test Amaya's remote connection capabilities. Amaya does manage to some extent to feel like a browser that let's you edit what you see, but some of the rendering is strange and not in line with how mainstream browsers render pages. Javascripts will not run, and even some relatively simple CSS declarations seem to go unheeded. A quick glance at the Wes home page will suffice to exemplify the rendering inadequacies. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that Amaya will ever lend itself to working with widespread forms of server scripting. Instead, the W3C is promoting its own templating scheme called XTiger. I think we would be ill-advised to adopt such an idiosyncratic approach even though it is open source, cross platform, and very inviting in theory. –Kevin
Content Only
Content and Design
Designers
Administrators
Content Only
Content & Design
Designers
Administrators
php script http://phpformgen.sourceforge.net/
list of php & perl scripts http://www.formgenics.com/help/index.php#processing
php program http://sitehelpcenter.com/free-php-scripts/free-form-generator-php-script.php
Permissions
(first two seem like big packages) * webmin (http://www.webmin.com) * C-panel (http://www.cpanel.net/index.html) * Adobe Version Cue CS3 (http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/versioncue/?xNav=WPVC)
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