Content Management Made Easy - with Editize!

Content Management is one of the most common Web-related issues that confronts organizations today. Everyone agrees that it's important to keep Website content current and relevant. Information that's out-of-date reflects poorly on an organization. Content Management Systems allow designated users to maintain and update their respective areas of a site.

Many proprietary Content Management Systems (CMS) can cost between $50,000 to $100,000 -- or even more. For this reason, many developers choose to develop their own solutions that will meet their specific needs. I recommend Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL as a very practical book for learning more about the different issues involved in this task.

Whichever CMS solution you use, there must be some way for the user to format the content they submit to update the Website. There are several options, one of which is to teach each user basic HTML tags. This approach is cumbersome, does not scale well, and invites code errors and other problems. Another option is to programmatically format the submitted content (which is dealt with in chapter 7 of the book mentioned above).

However, the best solution is to use a replacement for the TEXTAREA tag. Ideally, the solution will offer the end-user a familiar environment that would be similar to a word processor, and will allow the user to format text (or other content) using the point-and-click method.

What's on the Agenda?

This tutorial charts the progress of a project I was recently involved in, as Webmaster at my local community college. First, I'll explain the college's needs, and the criteria we used to assess each solution we considered. Next, I'll show you how to integrate the solution we chose into your own site. And finally, I'll explain how to embed the solution into your site's CMS.

A Case Study

The college was in need of a way to allow individual team members to update certain pages of the site on a daily basis, on short notice. Rather than have users continually submit these small, detailed changes to the Webmaster, it made more sense to provide a way for each individual who had responsibility for a particular area of the site to be able to make the changes themselves.

As many team members were not technically-trained, I knew that a replacement for the TEXTAREA tag was needed to provide these users with an effective and user-friendly interface through which they could submit their content changes.

Some solutions on the market at the time were only available for ASP, and were therefore not an option, as the server used by the college only supported PHP. Other solutions involved licensing structures that would become rather expensive as more team members began to use the system -- a fact that negated the benefits to be gained through distributed authoring and publishing.

Often, products that claimed to be easy to use required explanation through weighty instruction manuals. The community college didn't want the hassle of providing extensive training for staff. They wanted an inexpensive, easy solution.

My research eventually lead me to Editize. This product was an obvious winner, in that it was inexpensive and supported a variety of scripting languages including PHP. The licensing was also very flexible (as a matter of fact, the initial cost of $149 includes an unlimited number of end-users). And to my surprise, Editize was truly easy to use.

The Editize User Interface

As you can see below, Editize loads directly into the Web page (as an applet), and provides the end-user with a comfortable word-processor type environment. Editize also gave me, as the site's Webmaster, complete control over the editing features I was comfortable to give the CMS's users. Each feature can be disabled if I so desire.

Editize offers a full complement of editing features:

• Paragraph styles
• Paragraph alignment
• Bulleted and numbered lists
• Bold, italic, and underlined text
• Configurable higlighted text color for key words and phrases
• Inline code display in technical articles in a mono-spaced font
• Full support for hyperlinks (with pre-configurable URLs)
• Full support for images
• Insert and modify images
• Insert and edit tables
• Tabbed WYSIWYG/Code view interface for advanced users

A key advantage of incorporating Editize into your Content Management System is that the "look and feel" of your site is protected, while users are given just enough freedom to edit and format predefined areas within given Web pages. For example, Editize's "highlighted text" option can be controlled by a CSS setting that forces highlighted text to be set to a predefined color.

So far, so good. I liked what I saw, so I decided to give Editize a try.