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.
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.
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).