Employer wants any non-technical staff to be able to modify content - easy solution?

Question

I'm in a bit of a pickle at work. My department designs a number of internal systems for the company, mostly data-reporting related. We have less than 10 true content pages that actually need to be maintained by a human. These pages were written in PHP and maintained through Dreamweaver by a non-technical staff members - they used the design editor, and avoided the code as much as possible. There were issues, but overall it worked well.

Recently this project was updated and converted to a ASP.NET Web Application. This resulted in some architecture changes, making the content harder to edit with a WYSIWIG editor (it's now revision controlled, it's compiled and thus must be re-deployed after modifications are made, etc.). We sort of assumed that the staff member who had been maintaining it would just continue to do so, now using Visual Studio's "Design" mode instead of Dreamweaver's. We were mistaken, and it isn't an option for technical and non-technical reasons.

The staff member will not be touching any HTML - we need a WYSIWIG editor (this is a requirement we were handed...no arguing with them over that). I started looking at CMS', mainly Drupal, but after a bit of playing around I see that content 'Blocks' don't really have a WYSIWIG editor, instead expecting HTML. Is this true for all CMS'? Is there some easy-to-setup CMS out there that comes with a WYSIWIG editor? Does anyone have any other ideas? Don't care what language it's in, I'll make something work.

This really isn't my area of expertise - I do application development primarily, with an occasional web front-end. Not sure I'm even asking the right question, but hoping someone can help.

Answer 1

WordPress makes use of TinyMCE, and it works pretty well for some NON techie clients of mine. You can write (PHP) scripts that will call the WP functions and pull the page content.

Back to the point, I have found the backend of WordPress to be usable and friendly to a good mix of people. We often use it for a backend and build something completely custom for the frontend, and have had good results.

Answer 2

I am by no means a CMS expert, but I believe SiteCore might suit your needs. It is a .NET system, built on top of ASP.NET, and from my limited experience with it, the UI for business users is very usable.

Answer 3

Take a look on Joomla. It includes WYSIWYG editor. It is much simpler than Drupal

Answer 4

As Frank points out, TinyMCE is a great option, in fact you use it here :D. Have a look at some examples: http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/examples/full.php

The good point is that TinyMCE is just javascript, so in theory you can add it to any CMS, or in fact to any HTML form.

Also, I think is the default input method for Joomla if you are interested.

Answer 5

I would recommend CKEditor (the successor to the FCKEditor), I haven't used FCKEditor in ASP .NET code, but have used it in PHP with a lot of success. I haven't gotten around to converting old code to CKEditor, but plan to in the future.

If this is something where you can load HTML files from your server that has FTP access...a quick and dirty solution I have used is CushyCMS.com, you supply ftp credentials and hook up the files and they are good to go. Non-technical customers of mine have liked the editor a lot. It allows you to specifically say what you want edited and what you don't.

In PHP the way I usually architect using CushyCMS is to have the main page do a require_once on the content page and the content page has the HTML block that I want them to be able to edit.

so the code looks like this:

<?php
  //...other code
  require_once("page_content.php");
  //...other code
?>

where page_content.php looks something like this:

<div id="whatever" class="cushycms">
    editable text here
</div>

Hope this helps.

Answer 6

I used to think that for user friendly editing, you need a WYSIWYG editor, such as the TinyMCE that has already mentioned. Not any more.

Editing content in such a rich text editor is not very handy. Very often you end up messing up the content, and either does a technically savvy person have to come to help, or you have to switch to CODE view (= HTML) to clean up the mess.

Now I'd be far more inclined to use something Markdown, like this site (and Reddit) uses. For most purposes, you don't need rich text, and it is just as handy a WYSIWYG tool. If you need a few rich text touches, like making some text bold or italic, this works quite easily too. Lists, either numbered or bulletted, are a snap. And making links... Those WYSIWYG tools always seem to be able to mess it up in ways you can't even imagine.

Plus, this way, the resulting HTML is always clean and minimal, and it's extremely hard for the user to mess up.

Answer 7

http://www.cushycms.com/

They let you add easy WYSIWYG capability to any website, regardless of the technology used. You just add a tag once in your source file, and let your users go to CushyCMS.com to add text content.

Answer 8

What about Expression Web? It is made to edit ASP.NET web pages, and can integrate with TFS