[Pc_Support] OT ??? Content Managment

[Damien McKenna]

JohnH wrote:
> I update 3 different websites and one of them has asked if they could 
> edit certain portions of the site themselves.

A fairly common request.

> They would have several people to do the updates but not necessarily 
> at the same time or from the same location.
> Is there a free content manager I could use to experiment with just to 
> see how this would work?

There are *loads* depending on the requirements.

> I have never used such a program, I use DreamWeaver, CoffeeCup HTML 
> editor, and an old version of TrellixWeb (now CuteSiteBuilder).

There are three main approaches to this:

1. Shoehorn something simple with server side includes and giving them a 
simple HTML editor.  Using either SSI (files ending in .shtml) or apache 
.htaccess configuration files, link in a header and footer on each page, 
leaving each actual page to only have the relevant content.  You'd be 
basically getting them to do most of the work with this option and it 
could cause problems with then make mistakes (and they will).  If 
there's someone technically competent on-side I suggest making them 
responsible for file uploading and content verification before 
uploading.  Also, I suggest either using Subversion to keep a record of 
all code changes or do daily/weekly backups of the website so when they 
screw up the site you can refer back to what it should be.

2. Use an off-the-shelf system.  There are *tonnes* of these available 
depending on your needs.  It sounds like you don't need anything too 
sophisticated so you might consider something like a Wiki that lets you 
password-protect the page editor and customize the layout so you can 
hide all of the usual Wiki stuff you don't need.  This can range from 
simple to extremely complicated to do, depending on what you decide on.  
I suggest starting with http://www.opensourcecms.com/ which gives lots 
of info on different options.  One thing to consider is what the web 
hosting service has available for you to use - PHP, ASP, JSP, Ruby on 
Rails, MySQL, SQL Server, etc, etc, this will have a bearing on what you 
decide.

3. Work out exactly what they need and roll your own.  You'll have to 
learn a language (Ruby on Rails and ColdFusion are both good ones for 
beginners) then write it yourself.  Lots of beginners books for these 
technologies have step-by-step guides on doing a basic CMS so you could 
browse the book shelves at your favorite book store in the Web 
Development section to see if any are included.  One good thing with 
this is that you'll learn how to customize & modify the system in the 
process, rather than being stuck at a beginner's level trying to 
understand this complex, massive beast of a product.