Advice on important content Topic is solved

[Guizmo]

What are your ideas about this :

Let's take the example of having the need to handle much information in a web content management context. The problem is that with every CMS i know and CMS MS is of course included, we will fulffill informations through the wysiwyg editor we wanted which has a very slow behaviour compared to a desktop application.

If you have doubts, try by yourself, first to fullfill  a lot of information in your fckeditor or tiny mce and you will see you will go through different user cases, mostly because of page setup reasons, which will slow down your redaction compared to a desktop tool, let's say openoffice writer for example. As page setup is not the only issue, there are other things that will slow you down like the url link you will define in the document or the images you will include into it and so on. Here the very repetitive low response time will make your work in the web environment complety inefficient when compared to the work you will do in a desktop environment.

So, the question is simple : do you have ideas, advice in ways to improve the productivity of web content management ?
Here, i mean in the context of writing a lot of informations, imagine you are the writer of a documentation center for example and as you need some functionnalities of a CMS, you simply can't do a static website and so all write down in dreamweaver and that's all... on the other hand doing parts of the job with dreamweaver or openoffice writer and then using a cms capability which make the import would be a first start of a solution.

[robsta]

I guess it depends on what you mean by documents...

If I had a constant flow of documents that required uploading... (say in the 100s a day).. I'd probably workflow it by creating a template in Word with specific styles setup that matched the names of those in my website css sheet. And then lock the document down so that only those styles exist.

All of my content would then be generated in that word template. Then you'd save each word document as a web page and put them in a folder on the website via ftp or upload... then write a script that imported the part of the document into a cmsms content block... (with a few preg_replaces to get rid of extraneous font styling etc)...

so the workflow would be

1. Generate content in predefined word template
2. Save as a webpage
3. load saved webpage and images into server side folder via ftp or a custom formbuilder form
4. a script server side generates the cleaned html and puts the images in the right place (relinking on the fly).
5. and then generates a cmsms content page (which you then put where you need).

It'd be a pretty good case study for a module...

R

[Guizmo]

By now, i don't see any other solution. The drawback, except to develop a module, is the number of steps.
Here we have 4 steps for each page to build but no way to do better except in having a logic directly in the desktop tool

[robsta]

If the docs are read only you could always generate them as pdfs and have a page as a generic ftp-like filebrowser...

[Guizmo]

In my idea, it's more like a wikipedia than a DMS (document management system) in which there would't be any problem.
In the context of a CMS, dreamweaver or nvu may be a better solution than a word or an openoffice writer but there are still several steps.

[robsta]

of course the other option is you have a folder on your local server that automatically ftps the word docs whenever they are placed in it... like rysnc via ftp... but in one direction

Then you'd have

1. Open Template
2. Save document to web drive

And the local server does the rest triggering the script on the webserver when new content is loaded...

R

[Guizmo]

yep rsync, ftp and so on but i also think of end users, the ones for those even ftp is an obscur mysterious and awful complicated little thing probably dangerous for their mind and directly go the church to forget the name... so for communication protocol, i would think more a kind of a dedicated solution between the desktop app and the cms on server, something around web services (rest or soap or whatever) where the user has nearly just to click a button to sync the content. Sync is a subject that raises many questions and a lot of work...whatever that makes me thing of the import/export HTML package of the DMS Docmgr http://wiki.docmgr.org/index.php/DocMGR, good work, the kind of thing it would be great to see in CMS MS.

On the desktop side, i'm looking for it , first it has to be multiplatform or i elimate it....hum i saw NVU is like to be stopped because the developper is working on something else, that drives me to the point to eliminate whatever is developed by only one person what else ... no use to complicate things : as the target is to be html, i think it's appropriate to choose an app which works with html for the start. First idea is to look into Netbeans and Eclipse platforms.

If you have others thinking...

[Guizmo]

In fact, as a tool, if we take a Lotus Notes client, we obtain the 0 intermediate step 
I think i will develop something based on this client, as i still didn't find something that could eventually looks as a competitor

[robsta]

Although with Microsoft moving towards OpenDoc (ie xml) then you could easily write a parser (and I'd imagine someone has already done it) to do the donkey work for documents created by Office 2007 users... then just a save to a shared folder and a bit of black magic will do it.

Let me know how you get on Lotus BTW is awful on a mac... well mine at least ; )

[Guizmo]

I dropped MS Office months ago for several reasons and i don't think i'll be back on it
BTW ? What is your Lotus Notes release ?
While the thing could absolutely be done on a classic Lotus Notes release, i will play with Hannover and if the work is a proof of concept, i will adjust the compatibility for lower releases

[tsw]

The Solution (TM) is to have webservice layer that can handle adding / deleting / modifying data and all other aspects. if the webservice layer is good then its just a matter of writing your own software with whatever language you want.

or if you want to create html pages and upload them with ftp you just need a script to run through the files and then use webservice to push them to cmsms.

I already started module for this, but it wont probably go anywhere for a while (too much work) and with 2.0 orm layer it wont probably ever make it to 1.x series

[Guizmo]

Relying on your 3 points, i have to check and test some things b ut here are the ideas i will follow :

1. I will not target specifically CMS MS or whatever so web services will certainly be useful in this context to create between different tools and technologies. For CRUD operations, i'm thinking of using QCodo framework which create class from the repository model. QCodo has also some web services facilities.

2. I have to check what i can exactly do with the Lotus client. The idea is to upload html but no need of ftp (just a transfert protocol which does not have logic inside like you usually have in web services), just web services will be fine. Furthermore if you introduce something like ftp, webservices are useless.

3. By the use of QCodo, CMS MS should not change a thing in the approach.