On Sun, Jan 28, 2007 at 04:47:15PM -0600, Larry Garfield wrote:
On Sunday 28 January 2007 4:01 pm, cl@isbd.net wrote:
I was hoping to avoid HTML by using Drupal (or another CMS), I thought the point of the exercise was to make it easy for non-techie people to enter web content.
I think a lot of this boils down to the question of what you mean by "content".
If your "content" is a list of names, phone numbers, scores, or other small bits of content, then you are best served by using CCK to have lots of little fields of primitive content (plain strings, numbers, etc.). Then your uses aren't writing HTML, but get a stock layout that you define in the template. This is closest to the "Access forms" example.
No, it's nearest to the *result* of designing an Access form, I want to create my site with something like the forms design in Access.
If you want them to be able to define "freeform blobs of text", then, quite simply, any program that claims to let you do that without HTML (either hand-written or code-generated like TinyMCE) is lying. It has to be HTML when it gets to the browser. Somewhere between the user's brain and the print statement that sends it to the browser later, it has to get converted to HTML. That can be something the user does himself or something TinyMCE (or any other markup assistance utility) does, but it has to happen somewhere.
Yes, and I think my issues are fundamentally here. Creating the HTML in a textarea (which is fundamentally what you have to do in a browser based system) is inevitably rather feeble.
I think what I'm after is a more integrated system where the HTML entry is part of a single web-site creation utility. This is *very* difficult in a browser because of the limitations of the web protocols.
Take the browser/on-line requirement away and it becomes easier, what I'm after is a 'better NVU' if you like, an NVU which gives you more control over the site as a whole as well as the individual pages.
Even using something like the internal link module (which lets you specify a link to another page on the site by its path, like so: [node/5]) gets rendered down to HTML eventually. That is unavoidable, no matter what publishing system you use. If you want to format something, you need a formatting system and syntax and you need to know that system and syntax. That's the case even in word processors.
Perhaps you can give a better example of what sort of content your users will be adding? That would make it easier to recommend something to you (Drupal or otherwise).
I want to design a web site! :-)
By that I mean I want a tool that will make it easy for me (and one other person probably) to create from scratch a small, static but professional looking web site.
To my mind to do this I need control over all (or at least most) aspects of what the site looks like from one place. I want to be able to approach it something like as follows:-
Add some blocks of text and headings to an empty page.
Then do a bit of layout, e.g. change the background colour, maybe add some menus across the top or in a sidebar. Save these as site-wide defaults.
Add some more text and sub-pages, tune the colours, menus, etc. as I go and as I find more thngs I need.
Continue adding content and tuning the layout as the site develops.
The requirement to go into totally 'other' areas of the CMS to simply change a background colour for example makes the above sort of incremental (and integrated) approach to creating a site rather difficult.
Most CMS systems seem to be aimed at the situation where the creation of the site framework and structure is a sort of 'sysop' role and much of the content comes from lots of 'outsiders' (which may of course include the 'sysop' with a different hat on). This isn't where I am, there will be one, or two, or three people involved and they will all be doing a spread of tasks across the system.