WYSIWYG HTML Editor, buy software or develop easily?

[DanielN]

I just started with a major corporation in IT and have proposed an in-house site built from the ground up (by me of course) to replace the very expensive CMS they are currently paying for. The current system that they use has a built-in wysiwyg html editor for authoring content pages, and I am assuring them that this is something we can have in our own site.

My question is this, are there any really professional wysiwyg editor software packages we can buy to plug into the website, or is it something I can develop myself?

I am a graphics/layout guy with extensive knowledge of XHTML and CSS, but I don't generally program. I could follow tutorials, but you get the idea.

I have three requirements:

1. The company owns the editor and all rights to it with unlimited license to use it however we want (including reselling the CMS as a service) once it's been purchased or developed.

2. Cannot spend more than a few hundred dollars on software, and unable to hire or contract anyone to develop it (it's software or do it myself at this point).

3. It must be full featured and have support for applying pre-defined CSS classes.

My proposal is next Tuesday and I want to be able to provide as much detail as possible about how the old functionality will be addressed in the new in-house site.
--------------------------------------------------

Thoughts, ideas, suggestions?

[ray326]

Building a CMS from the ground up is probably not a good idea, especially when you can pick from many open source ones at http://opensourcecms.com to fit your needs. Many of them can make use of one of the little embedded HTML editors like FSCK or TinyMCE.

[wh666-666]

Something i did see a while ago on macromedia (when it was still macromedia, now macromedia on adobe **grrr**) was contribute. I havnt used a demo yet but apparently it means you can design a template for a company and select who has permissions to edit what parts of the site etc. Anyway just have a read of it and see if it is of interest >>

adobe macromedia contribute 3 overview (http://www.adobe.com/products/contribute/)

[DanielN]

Thanks Wh666-666. I had completely forgotten about Contribute, but I had looked into it for a personal project earlier this year and I'm somewhat familiar with it. That might be a great solution for us.