Content Management - Is this possible?

Anon

I've been given what seems to me like an impossible, or at least extremely complicated task.

Create a website with a whole lot of content, that doesn't have a common format, contains formatting elements like tables, image maps and lists. And all of this needs to be kept up to date by a various employees in the company who have no idea about HTML or anything like it.

So I've been looking into all kinds of solutions, most of them involving some kind of simplified HTML like <a href="http://www.simian.ca/index/easytext">EasyText</a> for example.

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me, that a content management system only works if the pages you're managing have some kind of common format that doesn't involve silly tabular, column type arrangements.

What do you think? Is it possible, or do I have to go and tell my boss that all his beautiful pages need to be greatly simplified if he wants his team of non-web savy people to be able to edit them?

cordex

darn near anything can be a part of a content management system especially with most browsers supporting CSS to one extent or another.
Some elements, however, can take more time then they're worth.

Do you mind posting a link to the website or at least giving some details about some aspects of this project? I've got no idea what kind of level of complexity we're talking about here. Everything you've listed, I've done (except for creating image maps via PHP ... I've populated the image maps from a DB, but never actually created them using a program ...).

-Ben

Anon

Well, the site's is still in it's very early stages, but I'll try to give an example.

Say I've got a template with a centre panel where my content is going to show up from a database.

Here's some random content:

http://www.abolicao.co.uk/example/example.html

Now, one of my team of non-techy editors needs to be able to come in and make changes to that content with no knowledge of HTML, CSS or anything like it.

I'm particularly interested in how to deal with the tables. Don't worry about the image that doesn't show up.

Anon

Sure, you should be able to do that.

When I was presented with the issue of how to handle dynamic tables, I cooked up a script to generate the correctly sized template. Basically, it displayed a table full of clickable boxes (I could adjust the size). When you hover over a box, it highlights all the boxes above and to the left of it - showing what table boxes will be active. Then, when they click on a box, it sends the height and width to itself and creates a template for this table.

For your project, I would suggest allowing templates to be inserted into other templates ... hard to explain, easier to do.

It's a big project, no doubt, but it is very do-able.