You can do a certain amount in advance - creating the general basics like font selections, colour schemes etc. Much depends on how "designed" you want the site to look.
Something fairly basic but easy on the eye has a lot to be said for it over the rigid overly prescriptive designed sites so beloved of designers with a page layout and design background.
Yup that's a good approach for this sort of thing. There are a number of off the shelf content management systems out there that can also do a fair amount of the work for you in cases like this.
Something basic? See wodney.
Indeed. Front page is not much better, and it can't help fiddling when you try to round trip code written elsewhere through it.
Not so convinced about that... I find I can get reasonable results out of that without it also stomping all over my JSP and other code.
I said basic, not pointless!
I'll put another vote in for Blue Griffon as worthy of consideration and also free. You can run it almost WYSIWIG mode too with tags shown in much the same way as Hotmetal used to do before Corel discontinued it.
Regards, Martin Brown
An old essay of mine on this topic:
Easy. Unicode stored and served as UTF-8 (no BOM) throughout. Easy, does the job, works internationally.
As a tip, embed a copyright character somewhere on the page (blurb footers are good). Do this as a literal copyright character (typed in under Windows as Alt 0169) rather than a character entity. Now see if it's displayed correctly, and if the served page is delivered as UTF-8. If it is, then you're good, and you're probably good for embedded Norwegian and Urdu too.
Note that "Save as Unicode" in many Windows tools is actually "Save as UTF-16" - you need "Save as UTF-8 (No BOM)"
Host on Apache. Learn enough Apache config to understand serving as UTF-8, SSI and redirects. Don't host on Zeus.
Avoid PHP. You probably don't need this, and if you do need it, you should be using someone else's pre-written Wordpress, not writing your own PHP.
Embedded WYSIWYG is much less trouble than WYSIWYG page design. The only formatting you need to preserve for most tasks is inline formatting and para / header breaks. These are usually generated reasonably well by WYSIWYG and aren't hard to sanitise and embed. The tricky stuff is when WYSIWYG is trying to embed 2D page layout. That's not only likely broken, but you probably don't need it for your site, as you're writing your own container anyway.
If you go down the CMS route, then there's sadly little available as a FOSS CMS. Your best options are more likely to be a wiki (over- complex, but it'll do the job) - which best means MediaWiki, or else one of the more sophisticated blog engines like Wordpress. Not quite so good a CMS as something really intended as a CMS, but it will do the job.
Here's an example of MediaWiki used as a CMS, then stretched to try and make it publically navigable, without looking too much like a wiki.
I would suggest that you learn HTML and get on with it, using a coder's text editor.
HTML is easy. It's complicated by two factors: people telling you it's hard and the awful tutorial information out there - almost all of which is wrong.
Use HTML 4.01 Strict, not 3.2, not XHTML, not HTML 4 Transitional, not HTML 5.
Read the two "Head First" books, "Head First Web Design" and "Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML" Borrow these from the library, as they're both an excellent one-off tutorial read, but not ongoing references. Maybe get a copy of Lie & Bos' CSS book as a desk reference.
You now know HTML. You now know enough HTML to handle semantic markup for new embedded content, and enough HTML to do maintenance on an existing site design. You don't know enough to design a site or to design layout. You don't know any useful CSS either.
Read brainjar.com to learn how CSS positioning works. Particularly the half-dozen ways to do side-by side content, tables (not always using ) and how to do sidebars, columns or menus.
Lift your site design from bluerobot.com or glish.com who have some useful two- or three-column designs, with menus.
Glue the bits together, then have your CSS expert skin the site for its look and feel.
Use SSI to hold the complicated, fragile parts separate from the community-edited content chunks.
If editors change things, that's enough. If editors _create_ things, then you need more. Use either a blog engine or a wiki.
Admittedly once you remove WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, most appear to have very limited market share.
Owain
That's quite a bit like what I use my 'home' wiki for. It's just an easy way to store my personal knowledge base on web pages that look reasonably pretty without much effort. It also means (using the wiki I use) that I can set permissions to allow different family members to have their own areas to play in and allow the outside world to see only specific bits.
It's also a blog, I use a plugin for the wiki to provide this, so that's the social networking covered to an extent.
... not sure about being a showcase. :-)
I've no idea, but at this precise moment, Namo 3 has the advantage for me because I'm used to it. This may change with the next rewrite of my home page.
That's pretty neat!
I've been using XHTML 1 Strict
I will look those up later, thanks very much for the pointers
I did something similar with MoinMoin - another wiki engine. Here's what MoinMoin normally looks like:
and here's my attempt:
Hacking it around was less painful than I'd imagine it would be - basically I have a custom theme that overloads lots of the editing functionality so it doesn't do anything. For example I haven't a clue what 'Render as DocBook' does, and so no reason why even wiki editors should need to use it. So when you login, the only editing links you get are Edit, Info, Delete Page, Rename Page, Attachments and Recent Changes. It's also linked into the university single-signon system so no messing about with passwords, it's just a simple access list of user IDs.
Theo
All good advice. Personally I use TextWrangler.
I've only used MoinMoin once -- or rather I was supposed to be using it, but it was so ghastly I threw it away in favour of emacs and a hammer.
The SJ Namo editor used to be good for small projects. I haven't used it for some time but I did like it a lot. Some similarities to Dreamwesver, easier to use and came with a good graphics editing package in the bundle.
So, they produce a web editor but are dense enough to put all the text of their own website up as graphics, e.g.
and they actually expect to people to part with money for this editor?
It has pretty horrid UI, but underneath it's actually relatively sane. Every revision of every wiki page is a file, it isn't plumbed into some vast incomprehensible database. It's in Python, so easy to hack around. And once you've disabled all the unfriendly stuff (and it's full of it - like saying 'Immutable page' instead of 'You can't edit this page') it's reasonably pleasant.
One difficulty is conventional 'shared hosting' packages tend not to advertise python, while they all do PHP.
Theo
Are you claiming that it's the editor that forces The designer to do that? Not in my experience.
That's the trouble - I could re-code MoinMoin in no time, because it's a dead simple and "elegant" implementation. As a thing for page editors to use, it's fecking 'orrible.
I thought it was one page per file though, where each file was a delta- ed version history?
That's the sort of Stupid that makes buying decisions _so_ easy!
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