On 1/28/07, cl@isbd.net cl@isbd.net wrote:
OK, I can understand that but it isn't what a lot of CMS systems seem to be trying to sell me. *Lots* of them are saying that once you have set up your structure the 'designers' can relax and the non-techie members of staff can do all the data entry. What you're saying above is that the data entry is still really HTML and the non-techie users are going to have as much trouble as always (well, nearly, you have taken away the problems of creating a nice menu structure and a consistent look).
How much "trouble" your "non-techie" users depends on many variables. In your case, it certainly seems that if:
<a href="node/123">somewhere else</a>
is beyond your users (or their ability to be trained) does mean that you're going to have to venture outside of Drupal Core. This should be expected; no one that runs a Drupal site uses Core and only Core, I daresay.
Many have given fine suggestions, including one that I wrote (freelinking), which attempt to make it easier to link to other nodes. In the case of freelinking, the other nodes don't even have to exist at the time they're linked to.
You should also *play with the system*. I've got lots of users that are definitely non-techie, and for the most part simple text is fine with them, once I've show them the <a> tag. For those that need more markup, and I don't want to teach them HTML, I find that Markdown works incredibly well.