David Ascher wrote:
I'll jump in, since this is an issue I worry about w.r.t Zope's success well for places I know, such as university departments where faculty, not hackers, do web page editing and e.g. my organization, where I want e.g. the HR manager to be able to edit the web pages and blissfully ignore all of the cool Zope features that the webmaster really likes...
I'm planning to use Zope at a university department and thinking hard about how to use Zope to make editing content (especially text) *really* easy for these people. The previous set of webpages hasn't been updated since 1997 or so, and then barely so, so it has got to be trivial. The solution I'm thinking about revolves around Structured Text and a trick I got working today (see my post about role information for more info). My idea is quite simple; a typical web page consists of content and layout (of course there's overlap). The layout is designed by someone who's HTML savvy. Wherever there's editable content, this person leaves a tag like <!--#var "editable(some_id)"-->. 'editable' is an external method which does different things based on what role you have. If you're role anonymous, it just passes the text document associated with some_id through structured text, and displays it. If you're role 'editor' (or manager or whatever) it does the same, but it prepends a hyperlink. Clicking the hyperlink gets you into a very simple textarea form, where you can enter structured text and press 'change' and you're done updating the web page. You turn into 'editor' by logging into a special page (just like logging into the management screen makes you manager). This is about as trivial as it can get. There's not much freedom, but the people we're talking about aren't too concerned about freedom and flexibility (that's possibly why Microsoft is so successful :). [emacs discussion snipped :)] Uses-emacs-all-day-long-too-ly yours, Martijn