On Sun, Jan 28, 2007 at 02:02:15PM -0800, Earl Miles wrote:
cl@isbd.net wrote:
I think what I was hoping for (but doesn't seem to exist yet) is something like the report creation part of Access, or the Forms in Access. That isn't remotely WYSIWYG but it allows you to play about with the whole report/form in one window. Exponent *attempts* to be a bit like this but fails because it (like Drupal) has modules and stuff which you can't change or even get at easily when you're editing content.
What you ask is actually a very difficult thing to do in a browser. It can be done, and there are sites out there that do it, but it requires some *very* good javascript programmers and a lot of time and knowledge. To my knowledge there really aren't tools like this in opensource, at least not in the basic browser context.
If that's what you want and/or expect, it isn't something you'll get, unfortunately. It's pretty easy to do at the OS layer when you have a lot of widgets and tools, but the browser is *very* limited it what it can present to you. Javascript can go an extra step and do a lot of it, but Javascript has browser compatability problems out the wazoo and the CSS required to place things accurately is tedious at best and outright impossible at worst.
I don't actually want/need it via the browser, I am very happy doing all the management and editing of my web site on my home machine. Some of the hosting is *also* on the home machine (personal stuff) and the rest I feel it's a good idea to test off the live site anyway. I have shell access to all my hosting too.
I know that the flavour of the moment is separating content from structure but when I'm designing a web page I want to be able to change both from somewhere near the same place.
It's not really the flavour of the moment; it's the reality of the tools we have available. Believe me, if wysiwyg were easy, there'd be a lot of it. People really want it, it's a very common scenario. Heck, if you could make web page editing like Word...well you can but you get really really crappy output...and you don't do it in the browser, you do it in Word.
But why aren't there good non-browser site management suites? Or are there some that I have missed?