[Hidden-tech] How can clueless client update website

[Robert Heller]

At Mon, 15 Aug 2011 23:12:55 -0400 "B. Melville" <bobbimelville at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
>    ** Be sure to fill out the survey/skills inventory in the member's area.
>    ** If you did, we all thank you.
> 
> 
> I have a small theatrical group that wants me to rewrite their 
> website so that they can easily change information and add photos by 
> themselves on the fly. However, and it seems to be a big however, 
> nobody in their group knows anything about html, php, etc. Although 
> brilliant at what they do, they are completely and totally helpless 
> when it comes to code.
> 
> I've considered doing something with Wordpress. However, there are 
> many places on their website that they want to be able to change and 
> you can only have one blog associated with a Wordpress website. I've 
> been thinking about having several blogs that each feed into a 
> separate iframe on separate pages of their standard html 
> (non-wordpress) website. This seems cumbersome.

Maybe Joomla! would be what you want.  Joomla! is rather more 'heavy
duty' than WordPress, but it sounds like that is what you need. Esp.
with the ACL plugin.  You can create various sections and categories and
assign a section/category to selected pages which would be 'article category
blogs', each of which would be asociated with a partitular menu and all
would have the 'standard' 'scenery' (heading, nav menu, footer, side
bars, etc.).  And I suspect that a theatrical group would find the
calendar plugin useful for performance dates, etc.

The Town of Wendell (http://www.wendellmass.us) has a website based on
Joomla! and for most town officals (who are probably similarly
'clueless' WRT HTML, etc.), this seems to work quite well.  We do have
some clueful people, including a website committee, do deal with the
hairier things, but that is not something that needs dealing with
frequently. And even the 'back end' stuff does not really need 'coding
expertise' either.

> 
> I've also considered doing editable regions on their website. The 
> problem with this is that they do not have Dreamweaver. They need to 
> be able to make changes without using an expensive program.
> 
> Does anybody have any ideas about how I could set up this site for them?

I'd say go with Joomla!  It is open source (free) and can be updated
with nothing more than a standard web browser (eg IE, FF, etc.).

> 
> _______________________________________________
> Hidden-discuss mailing list - home page: http://www.hidden-tech.net
> Hidden-discuss at lists.hidden-tech.net
> 
> You are receiving this because you are on the Hidden-Tech Discussion list.
> If you would like to change your list preferences, Go to the Members   
> page on the Hidden Tech Web site.
> http://www.hidden-tech.net/members
> 
>                                                                                                   

-- 
Robert Heller             -- 978-544-6933 / heller at deepsoft.com
Deepwoods Software        -- http://www.deepsoft.com/
()  ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail
/\  www.asciiribbon.org   -- against proprietary attachments