Everyone can get out their shotgun for what I'm about to say, but... BigMedium CMS (www.globalmoxie.com) is an excellent example of a user-friendly CMS that non-techies can use. Maybe that could be our model. If you haven't played with it, you should, as Josh has done a great job of abstracting the nerdy parts from users.
Marcus -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Adam van den Hoven Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2008 10:01 AM To: radiant@radiantcms.org Subject: Re: [Radiant] Can Radiant be really easy to use for non-technicalcontent editors? I'd like to see this too. I use it for exactly this purpose, to give non-technical people the ability to manage a simple website using a CMS. To be honest, I think that the mostly technical person doesn't really need an OS CMS, they can either hand code the HTML just as easily (maybe run some scripts to generate naviation) and upload the files via ftp/svn or write their own CMS. Its precisely when we have more complicated needs (of which multiple, non-technical users is a likely one) that Radiant becomes most useful. I have some thoughts on this: 1) What would be awesome would be a WYSIWIG editor plugin that is an EXTENSIBLE HTML/XML editor. This would allow one to create GUI elements for all of the common radius tags (override creating links, for example, putting an asset browser into there, etc) and have it create the necessary markup. Maybe a markup WYSIWYG editor will allow this too but I don't know of any 2) Normally when someone wants a custom template that captures something specific (a news article or a product) really its just a way to more seamlessly (and realiably) enforce content structure (here is you headline, here is your kicker, a product image goes in this box....) but really all we want to do is generate structured markup for various parts. It would be wonderful if one could create page "templates" that imposed some sort of structure but behind the scenes simply added a page to the database with a number of parts with predefined markup. (I'm not sure if this is like the templates extension Sean released.. Haven't had a chance to look at it). Making it part of the "pages" structure keeps it clear where it appears. On the other hand, you can tell your client that if they really want all that they're looking at a system like Teamsite from Interwoven which would probably cost them in the range of a half million plus 10% per year (but don't forget to put your 4% markup on that)... Adam On 18-Nov-08, at 9:44 AM, Casper Fabricius wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I've used Radiant for more than 10 web sites during the past 1,5 > years, and I really like it. Definitely the best CMS for Rails. > > However, I have a client whose content editor is very frustrated with > the system. She can only just tolerate using Markup, and she refuses > to write any kind of HTML - Radius tags falls into this category from > her point of view. According to her, a proper CMS would hide all this > "technical stuff" and provide custom forms for all types of content. > > I know what the core team might answer: Radiant CMS was not built for > this woman. It was built for small sites and content editors with a > bit of technical insight. But Radiant is still the most user- friendly > CMS that exists for Rails, and I don't really feel like coding PHP > just get a more "advanced" UI, which will suck anyway. > > So my question is: How do the rest of you handle this? How do you hide > away "technical" stuff such as snippets, tags and css classes? > Do you: > - Use any of the WYSIWYG filters? (I've done this a few times, it has > its own problems) > - Build very specific custom layouts for all variants for pages? > - Use a generic templating interface such as radiant-templates- > extension to wrap everything up? > - Write custom extensions to wrap all kinds of "elements" nicely in > forms? (such as newsletters, spots, list of various items, etc.) > > Can Radiant be palatable for content editors such as my client, or is > it simply the wrong choice in this case? > > Med venlig hilsen / Best regards, > Casper Fabricius > http://casperfabricius.com > > _______________________________________________ > Radiant mailing list > Post: Radiant@radiantcms.org > Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/ > Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant _______________________________________________ Radiant mailing list Post: Radiant@radiantcms.org Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/ Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant _______________________________________________ Radiant mailing list Post: Radiant@radiantcms.org Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/ Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant
