Oh, and I want a pony too

[telophase]

I put it to you, dear readers who might know something about web design and development, and CMSs or the like: is there something out there which both allows for me to design a site using a lot of components* and which allows users to edit the content of those components without knowing much about the nitty-gritty and without breaking the site too easily?

And into which we can insert ASP code as necessary for messing about with our databases and the like. We've got a decade of scripts that aren't going to get rewritten anytime soon. And which runs on a Windows server? I know, that might be asking a bit much. Admittedly, if the best solution works out to be run on Unix/Linux or some such, we can probably convert everything, but it's going to take a while.

Pay solutions fine. We don't have a great track record with open source, it seems. :D


* In other words, so I can create content in little packets and insert it into whatever page I want? So I can, say, create a packet that contains a simple form for searching the catalog plus links to the databases page and the ejournals page and also a paragraph or two of text, and then plug it into several different pages across the site?

Comments

[snarp]

gpEasy fulfills the first requirement, but I have no idea if it would cooperate with ASP.Net. It looks like it should run on a Windows server, but I've only ever used it on Linux.

[telophase]

Oh, we're not even as modern as ASP.net. We're using classic ASP. :D

Thanks! I'll take a look!

[green_knight]

I don't know whether Wordpress (which is PHP with a glorified front end) and ASP will play nicely, but... why not?

The nice thing about Wordpress is that you can set up custom post types, so that you could give one person privileges for updating 'news items' without giving them access to the static pages.

[jarodrussell.livejournal.com]

What it sounds like you want is a way to drop widgets onto a web page without actually changing the guts of the web page. You might want to look into using the <iframe> (http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_iframe.asp) tags, which would let you spin up a separate server-side project anywhere and then embed it with a little HTML or JavaScript.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

IThis is all just speculation and exploration at the moment, for the next iteration of the website, which will take place in two years. However, if we go with a homebrew solution rather than a CMS,* I'd probably just use includes rather than iframes to drop the content packets in. I think it'd work better across platforms and be easier to design around, as these pages are going to have to work on phones, tablets, and desktops.


* and it still needs some sort of WYSIWIG editor for the users to edit the content assigned to them; Adobe's slowly pushing Contribute away in favor of their own hosted solution, and it wasn't all that good to begin with because we didn't get it until after I designed and built the current site, so I didn't build the site to work with it.

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you want a mix of Dreamweaver and Contribute? At least, that's how they do it here. No-tech users use Contribute and the big dogs use Dreamweaver. Spendy, but works well for us.

ETA: Looks like we're moving to Drupal. Here's some info which you'd be better able to poke through and make sense of. http://cms.ku.edu/about

(I just flail at our small branch library site, and thus nobody tells me anything. I'm still on Dreamweaver CS2 if that tells you anything.)

[jarodrussell.livejournal.com]

Would the next system be ASP or could you pick something new? Either way...and apologies if my phrasing here sounds condescending...the "includes rather than iframes" is super-good, but to make it ultra-good learn how object-oriented programming works...and it works in PHP, ASP, ASP.Net, Python, etc. It took me eight years doing the web thing, but once OOP clicked a couple of years ago, it's made adding new features, and planning to add new features, much easier.

If you don't want to build from scratch, look into Plone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plone_(software)). It's written into Python, but it's designed to be easy to use, collaborative, do the heavy lifting of content management, but allow for extensibility. I looked at it when I was looking to revamp our web site, but it was too much for our small school, which I think will be served best by Wordpress.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Eh, that's what we already have. :) Although the Contribute was procured after the current design was built, so it wasn't designed to be used with it and is therefore a beast. And Adobe's starting to push Contribute aside in favor of its own hosted solution, so I'm starting to look at non-Contribute options. (Not to mention I have Very Strong Opinions about how they screwed with the workflow under the assumption that all institutions that get Contribute do it in order to give users the maximum amount of control. We got it so the people who knew the stuff could put it in the website, and they all hate having to send it out more than necessary to be reviewed and published.)

I'd really like to be able to keep the users out of any of the code. Contribute works somewhat at that, but it's too easy to accidentally screw up something I've put in--I've spent too long fixing pages where the rounded corners at the bottom of our packets of info have vanished. I'd love something that looks like a simplified Wordpress on the backend, where the users get in and edit the content only but have the ability to pull in, say, a bit of code that produces the department hours or a small display of the staff in that area. (like Wordpress shortcodes, come to think of it)

I don't think the perfect solution exists, alas, and I am so not using Wordpress as the CMS for this site. It's way too prone to being hacked.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Hey, no prob. :) I've been mostly futzing about with PHP and ASP because that's what our sites here are built on, and hadn't had a chance to learn much of anything else. If I can put together a convincing argument for other things, I can set time aside on the clock to learn/practice it.

My biggest thing is making the next site design responsive, and from what I understand in what I've been looking at about it, it'll require making sure all page content is, essentially, in boxes I can easily rearrange and resize for different screen widths. I'd love to be able to restrict users to editing just within the boxes (with the ability to pull in [but not edit] other types of content, like a list of daily hours for a department, or a display of the staff members and their contact info) so they don't run the risk of screwing up the site coding (I've fixed missing rounded corners on the current site too many times). Sort of like Wordpress edit pages and shortcodes, but I don't want to run this on WP, partly because the IT department here hates it and we have to collaborate with them on various things.

And for a pie-in-the-sky thing, it'd be great to have a setup where patrons can sign in with their ID number and create their own home page by dragging-and-dropping other content boxes or links.

Come to think of it, I ought to draw up a document with all the things I'd like to have in this and set the web committee loose on it to evaluate CMSes and the option of building our own.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Your spec. is unclear.

Do you want this to run on the pony or for it to be compatible with having the pony as a peripheral?