[selowitch]

Hi,

I have some colleagues who are allergic to HTML. I need a strategy for allowing them to easily edit/update web content without needing to know HTML but also adhering to very strict standards (i.e., valid XHTML) and using only numeric character references, using proper typgography (typographer's quotes, en- and em-dashes, copyright symbols, etc.).

I've thought of going with Macromedia Contribute, but it doesn't really seem to help with certain rich-text elements that newbies are likely to forget.

One thing's for sure: I plan to make everything the newbies are allowed to edit to be simple .txt files that are to be used as includes. No messing with my PHP code or JavaScripts, thank you very much!

Any suggestions on how to proceed?

[Macola]

I think you're dealing with two issues:

1. Newbies need to edit text on pages.
2. Newbies need to use correct styles, typography, etc.

Contribute should be fine for #1, but there's no software that can help with #2. Write up a good style guide, and fire anyone who doesn't follow it

[selowitch]

Originally Posted by Macola

I think you're dealing with two issues:

1. Newbies need to edit text on pages.
2. Newbies need to use correct styles, typography, etc.

Contribute should be fine for #1, but there's no software that can help with #2. Write up a good style guide, and fire anyone who doesn't follow it

Well, with #2 I'll be using external stylesheets. The only HTML tags my colleagues need to know are <h1>, <h2>, <p>, perhaps the occasional <em> or <strong> and <blockquote> — that's basically it. I do want them to use the proper numeric entities for such things as em-dashes (8212), and quotation marks (8220, 8217, 8221, etc., which I guess I can put in the Style Guide.

Yeah, maybe Contribute plus a Style Guide will do the trick. I'm going to encounter resistance, of course, but this will probably work.

I don't have fire-and-hire power over any of these folks, so I have to beg and plead for everything instead of threaten. Oh, well.

[Meijin]

Originally Posted by selowitch

Well, with #2 I'll be using external stylesheets. The only HTML tags my colleagues need to know are <h1>, <h2>, <p>, perhaps the occasional <em> or <strong> and <blockquote> — that's basically it. I do want them to use the proper numeric entities for such things as em-dashes (8212), and quotation marks (8220, 8217, 8221, etc., which I guess I can put in the Style Guide.

Yeah, maybe Contribute plus a Style Guide will do the trick. I'm going to encounter resistance, of course, but this will probably work.

I don't have fire-and-hire power over any of these folks, so I have to beg and plead for everything instead of threaten. Oh, well.

For what it's worth, I'd see if you can possibly pull off a CMS and some translating code on whatever your budget may be. I rolled out a contribute-based site early in the year and while it initially had some promise, I can't recommend it for anything but the most basic sites, and perhaps only then if you think that someone will lose interest in updating the site.

Here's my experiences:
1) Contribute, unless I completely missed something, requires your pages to be in Dreamweaver Template (.dwt) form so that elements can be added. This is fairly easy with static pages, it could be a pain with dynamic. Fortunately I only had to do static. When we did this, we also did it concurrent with a redesign and it lessened some of the pain but it still took a long time. Plus, once you enable dreamweaver compatibility, you will spend a lot of time waiting for working copies, locks & unlocks, etc.

2) You need to make a couple passes through your persmissions setup for write/publish authorized users. If you're not careful, you can let something slip and you will go to, say, the front page and see something like a garish piece of Word clipart on the front page, urging you to "Bee Cool" and not worry about some issue of the day. (Not that this ever happened on said contribute site, noooo, not at all.) Again: Make 100% sure you've got it locked down. (This goes without saying on any project, but since Contribute offers a lot more options to lock/unlock, it's easy to miss something.)

3) Contribute is, fortunately, not too awful with stylesheets -- even external. I still gave the common site text styles their own file just so nothing could happen.

4) Make sure you include any element that is not editable and put in a file with a nonstandard extension -- i.e. instead of "masthead.php", pull in "masthead.inc". I'm not sure if .ssi is safe or not.

I also helped on a site redesign as a hired gun and we did a javascript text editor (not unlike what you see editing text on this messageboard) that then parsed, validated, and translated the text. We were able to catch Word quotes and those general I-pasted-from-Word type errors; rewrote wannabe HTML, etc. Then before committing to database, we just translated the whole thing into XML (We had to repurpose content for WML, Flash, and HTML plus creative services was apparently integrating some XML based elements into their flow). It sounds like a lot of work, but we were able to get 95% of that flow done in a day. That allowed us to avoid a LOT of style problems. If you have the time/budget, I strongly recommend this sort of approach.

If not, go contribute, but I cannot urge you strong enough, lock it down and test it with a couple fake users first and see what kind of boneheaded ill-advised things you can do to make sure you're guarded against someone uploading, say, 300 megs of garbage PDFs. (again, not like this ever happened... nooooooo, not at all.)