Existing Website Management & Content Modification without CMS - php

My client needs function for editing and updating the website content (text, image etc) with ease. Not with FTP or other thing but rather just page from where he can edit easily..
I found some website which provide this service a year back. The procedure was simple
1) Click the Admin button and enter credentials
2) Now in place editing feature is enabled.
I know there are javascript for inplace editing but i do not need that..
I want a MODERATOR page from where i will (admin) set which content he is allowed to modify.
I tried using
PHPMYEDIT
and was happy but the program is too old fashioned there are many thing which are not updated..
Just like the PHPMYEDIT i need a Program OR a service online which have a feature of
Existing website content editing / update / delete / modify
My website is in PHP / MYSQL / JAVASCRIPT / JQUERY and other addons.
Kindly suggest a solution to my problem.
recently i came up with a site
http://grabaperch.com/
that does exactly what i say but it is little complex (for the client) still suggest any thing like that. Suggestion are welcome..
Important - The pages/content are static

I've used a service called CushyCMS before, with varying degrees of success. It does require that you add a class to the HTML selectors that you wish the client to be able to edit.
It is a type of 'lite' CMS without really being a CMS (it just hides the FTP transactions in the background and gives a simple WYSIWYG interface.
Hope that helps

If you can convert the website into wordpress it will be the best solution

If grabaperch.com is little complex for you,
take a look on Uzuvi, https://getuzuvi.com
This very little CMS also, like Perch, can be a drop-in editor of existing website.
But Uzuvi console UI has ultra simple design.
Need to say this CMS has no moderator feature you mentioned, may be yet.

Related

Creating an octopress theme from a wordpress theme

Ive been using wordpress for awhile now and wanted to try something different. Enter in my discovery of the world of static website generates. Now I have my eyes on Octopress which I know to be built on jekyll. Before I start getting dirty in ruby I want to know if its relatively possible to translate my current wordpress theme to a static site.
That's exactly what I did recently:
http://eduncan911.com/blog
I copied a friend's Wordpress theme (with permission) of almost the same design:
http://forgetfoo.com
"I want to know if its relatively possible"
To answer your first concern, the answer is a big ol' YES. That's what make Jekyll so good for these kind of things: it's just raw HTML and css and js in a few directories. Place them anywhere you like, and start cutting away at chunks in includes, wrap some plugins, etc and before you know it, you are rake generate and rake deploy.
Octopress makes it even sweeter by having a large number of plugins, a blog-like template system already structured*** (see below), and bunch of defaults all setup for blogging.
The issue with Octopress' theme is as I said above, it is purely setup as a blogging platform. You'd need to highly modify, or in my case just completely ignore, the template they have and just piggy back on the nice Github Pages, SCSS, and plugins it comes with and roll your own html templates. It's really really really easy.
Where do you start?
/source/index.html
You start here with this YAML file. At the top is a definition of layout, which is used to pick what "wrapper" or layout you want to surround this index.html content with. To make a new template, one like yours, I'd call it layout: fuse_homepage. Then go into source/_layouts/ and create a new `fuse_homepage.html'.
Start with your own theme and format as you want
But see, you don't even have to do that. Hell, just paste your entire homepage HTML right
into that source/index.html to start with (make sure to keep the --- YAML markers at the top, but get rid of the layout). Start there and break things out later when you get tired of coping and pasting the header/footers. Heck, just start there - make a fuse_header.html and fuse_footer.html and just share those for now.
Ignore Octopress' theme layout - it's just for hackers that don't do UX and just want to tweak things. Designers or people that like to control their code will want to roll your own.
It really is that flexible. However you want to break it up, you can. Want a new page, just call rake new_page["title"], which all this does is create either an /title.html, or /title/index.html, depending on your settings in the config file. But see, you don't even have to do that. Just create the file yourself - BAM, it is copied on deployment.
Regrets with Octopress
Trying to force the themes to do my bidding, chasing rabbits
I only regret trying to follow the Octopress' author's format - wasted so much time and got so turned off at Octopress. In the end, I just ignored it and did my own. Much easier, and I know where everything is. I also wanted nice and cleanly formatted HTML - a show that I care about my code. The default Octorpess theme and structure invites so many mis-placed tabs and spaces that it's just ugly. Doing your own, you are in full control, space by little space insert.
Importing posts
There's a huge amount of Google links to help you export your WRX from Wordpress, and to generate a the post files automagically. Be prepared to try several different ones as they aren't all perfect.
import comments into Disqus
Unless you are already using Disqus on Wordpress, you are going to have a horrible time with this one.
I can now claim myself to be an WRX/BlogML expert after my nearly 100 tries of importing and exporting and fixing and so on. There is no documentation on either importer (Disqus nor Wordpress) to tell you of the individual required fields. For example, Wordpress requires wp:comment_id to be set, and unique for each and every post you import whereas Disqus requires an wp:comment_email field, even though say it is optional (it's BS, argh).
Be prepared to hack code. It is a hacker's framework after all
Do note though: it is a lot of work to hack around the static site. Doing your own template will save you so much time. You'll also may want to write your own custom plugins, which I did, to get around the bugs in peoples github repos - it's pretty easy, but does require coding.
I spent about a month off and on until I got my new blog/static site to where I liked it for launch. A lot more than I wanted, but it was "fun" learning new languages (Ruby, Python, installed Debian linux in a VM cause Windows just sucks at that stuff).
If you aren't prepared to write that much, there are a couple more static site generators out there as I blogged about (hey, got to show off my Octopress and custom theme!):
http://eduncan911.com/software/the-static-blog-boom.html
Btw, nice site...

How to make a blog type page with prev & next page functionality?

I was wondering if I needed to learn javascript and or php to make a site that can move content from page to page as new content is added (like a blog). I was thinking of using wordpress and wipe the design and write my own css, but seems you need to do a $30 update to have access to css.
Is there a free site (like wordpress) that could help me out with the php part or whatever is needed to have this kind of functionality? How many hours would it take to learn php to get the 'blog' running correctly if I only know html/css right now, with a bit of javascript and can manage jquery plugins.
Thanks alot for any answers.
If I recall correctly, WordPress is entirely free and fully customization per your liking - no charge.
PHP would be your answer to do this, and Javascript would only help compliment the transitioning. If you've never tinkered with PHP or any other software programming language, you will spend months perfecting this. It's a whole other ball game.
But like I said, WordPress is entirely free and modifying the CSS is as well. I've never heard of a $30 charge to change WordPress CSS file.
You're talking about upgrading a WordPress.com site where they host it for you and strictly control what you can do.
You want to go to WordPress.org - it's free and you can do whatever you like - but you do need to sort out your own hosting.

Creating a Website for a Shop with Multiple Locations

I have a quick question. We are building a site for a shop that has 12 different locations. So there is a Portal page, and then the 12 locations pages.
The design is the same for each location, just different text and rotator images. What I did before for another site was just used PHP and a Database, and had a site.php?shop=city&page=about and just did some rewrites so it would be /city/about/ which works good.
That way when I need to make an overall design change, it will apply to all locations instead of duplicating the site 12 times and if I catch one thing, I need to do it on all 12 sites.
One thing that we don't like about that is if someone in the team needs to make a change to the text, they would need to go in the MySQL Database to make the content changes which they are unfamiliar with. I could create a basic CMS but I would like some suggestions on what else I can do to make this easy on everyone.
If I need to create one of the sites and duplicate it 11 times, I could do that but was just seeing if there were any easier ways you guys know of, where it would still be easy for people to update the content with FTP.
Thanks!
From my point of view you have a few options:
Build a basic update form with a basic WYSIWYG editor, more or less a very basic CMS
Use an include file structure then the user only needs to edit a text file for example for changes to reflect on the site, note they may need to know basic HTML and FTP is likely to be required
Give access to phpMyAdmin, again note they may need to know a little HTML (edit: as already suggested I just noticed, sorry need to load answers while I'm typing)
Install an out of the box CMS in the 'locations' or 'stores' directory and only have it used on these pages
Personally I would just build a simple CMS in this case... then again I have built around 15 CMS' in the past so it only takes me about an hour to code something like this.
Hope that helps you.
It is not ftp, but if you gave them access to phpmyadmin, with a login that only has access to that table then they could edit the data.

Can Wordpress be used to create webpages that tie into pre-existing php files and database?

I have a website that I've developed, which includes hand-written php, html, css, and js. I also created the MySQL database.
I've recently brought someone on who is going to make the website look better, but his experience is limitted to working with Wordpress. I'm wondering if it makes sense for him to the the front-end "skin" work with Wordpress and for me to edit the files as needed so they submit data to my php files and connect to my database. If the php generated by Wordpress is reasonable, this seems doable in theory.
The other way would be to take the html genrated by his php and use that as my starting point for hooking into my php processing files and database.
He sent me a dump of the files created after he created a simple webpage and there seemed to be a lot of extra stuff in there.
Can anyone with experience in this comment? I'm hoping there's an easy way to do this.
Thanks.
The default procedure for me that always worked well:
You provide outlines/simple sketchups/your old layout, so the "designer" knows vaguely how you want it to be
You define what the site should do ("there should be a button to...", "there should be a list of..., when you click on it..."). So he knows what happens and what site follows another. That's important! He must understand the site.
The better you do the above, the better the results you get from the designer will be
The designer generates layouts in pure HTML with CSS: Example sites with example data, where everything you said before is integrated.
You cut up the HTML-code and integrate it yourself in your php-code
This procedure has also the benefit, that an external designer does not get in contact with your application's internal php-code (and cannot "steal" it). And you can dry up your internal code when you integrate the HTML you get.

How to create and manage a dynamic page based on user generated content

I'm trying to create a website that will take data from some file as input to a javascript page that will then do some data crunching and spit out some html. Additionally, I want the website to allow users to upload their own data to then be displayed. I'm imagining something like where the top center of the page has the results of the javascript, and below is a list of uploads and clicking on one will update the top display with new data from that upload.
I obviously don't want to reinvent the wheel and roll my own user authentication and content management system, so I was looking at drupal. Is there some way to extend drupal to do this (or a module that already does)? Or is there a better way entirely that I'm not aware of? Thanks.
I don't know if there is a framework for this, but look into jQuery templating. Other javascript libraries also offer something similar. You might also want to look into the Cappuccino framework.
It seems you have a very specific JavaScript use case. It is necessary for all these things to take place on the client (i.e. browser) side with JavaScript? Can it not be done on server side? There are thousands of modules in Drupal and some of them might be able to fully/partially meet your requirements .
I'd suggest you buy a ebook/book version of the excellent https://www.packtpub.com/drupal-6-javascript-and-jquery/book by matt butcher. After reading this book you should be able to get a fair idea of the direction you need to head in.

Categories