Allowing users to create website from template

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+2 Q:

Allowing users to create website from template

Folks, I'm building a website for a very non-tech-savvy audience. The intent is to allow them to pick a website template from a list, and then customize the content of the provisioned website lightly.

The emphasis of ease of use (target audience can use email, and maybe facebook, but HTML is an acronym they've never heard, and neither is CSS) over customizability.

Can you recommend a few out-of-the box packages that do this well, and allow you to abstract away all the ugliness of complexity of typical CMS systems like Drupal/Wordpress/etc? I'm using PHP.

+1 A:

I'm good enough with HTML and CSS but sometimes I prefer to be lazy. I've had a pretty good experience with Google Sites. A fair amount of design power for a point-and-click user interface. Of course you will probably not want to offer the escape hatches down to HTML coding that Sites offers.

Carl Smotricz 2010-07-13 21:36:01

Thanks! Do you know if Google Sites can be provisioned / sandboxed to allow a subset of functionality? Also, do they support integration with an existing login system?

Alex 2010-07-13 21:46:53

(1) As far as I know, the Google Sites functionality is pretty much "take it or leave it," i.e. your users get the whole works and there's no choice. (2) Yes, I believe they let you point your own domain at a Google site, and "properly" support that domain.

Carl Smotricz 2010-07-13 21:51:16

Thanks!! Appreciate it!

Alex 2010-07-13 21:57:16

Note that I"m still looking for more suggestions from other folks, as Google Sites doesn't exactly solve my problem :-)

Alex 2010-07-14 00:47:29

Well, it ain't free but it seems to me that Unify (demo) is what you're looking for.

There is also Perch which is a similar alternative.

Alix Axel 2010-07-14 02:06:48

ansaurus

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Allowing users to create website from template

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