Ideas for a community based website

[slater]

Hi there,

I have recently created a site for a community based organization using postnuke. I chose postnuke because of the permissions as the specific groups within the community needed to be able to login and update certain pages in their own sections.

Unfortunately, I am finding the wys...editor to be highly restrictive and many of the functions are not working. Therefore, those groups will need to know some html in order to manipulate their pages properly (not a good thing, most are not computer literate).

I am wondering if anyone has other ideas as to how I could create this site using a different method, ie different cms, layout, script etc.

http://www.betweentheparks.com/index.php

The community groups section are the pages that need to be editable.

Any ideas?

Thanks

slater

[BeachSide]

Short of creating some sort of simple template system that your users can use, I don't think anything will be able to help you deal with people who are unfamiliar with HTML

[tomrogers]

I'm looking forward to a reply to this post. I run a community web site www.hwcsc.org which eats up a lot of time every week. I too would like to allow others to add content to the site.

I'm using FrontPage 2003 which has a Dynamic Web Template feature, that allows sections of a web page to be edited by others with permission. I've not used it yet, simply because the others would need to have FrontPage too.

Another web site that I think is really great is www.inbrockton.com. This site combines news feeds and message boards in an attractive format. They also allow visitors to change the skin to suit their taste. Does anyone know what program or template they are using? I've tried to contact the webmaster, but have not had a reply, I'm sure they are tapped out. This business is time consuming, but rewarding.

[Bahrian]

slater! Your problem is genuine. Content management systems like php-nuke etc. provides so many features but it sometimes becomes difficult even for the webmaster to use it comfortably. I have myself tried php-nuke many times but found myself in trouble when it comes to customization according to my desire & adding different types of content.

Anyhow, there is one other idea about it. Most of the WYSIWYG editors have very few HTML tags involved. For example break row, bold etc. So my idea here is giving a little help file to the client or clients which gives a list of like 5-10 tags most commonly used in WYSIWYG editors.

All the Best!

[tomrogers]

The template idea brought to mind something that might work. Although most people don't know how to create HTML, a lot of people have a copy of Word which has a template feature. You could set up a template for them, and it would be an HTML document. Or they could use Word on there own to create an HTML document. I'm not familiar with postnuke, but perhaps once they get it created in Word, maybe they can paste it in on there own. They would have the choice of using the postnuke editor, or using another program like Word to create the HTML. I believe if you search around you can also find free HTML editors.

Tom Rogers