RE: [Radiant] Can Radiant be really easy to use for non-technicalcontent editors?
Another thought, crazy as it might be, would be to create a FLEX component that represents a content editor. We do this on some of our flex apps, and it works well. Here's an example: http://cfsilence.com/blog/tips/rte/bin/richTextEditor.cfm This might allow for more control than JS based editors give, I'm not sure. Just another thought, from a FLEX nerd. Marcus -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Casper Fabricius Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2008 10:21 AM To: radiant@radiantcms.org Subject: Re: [Radiant] Can Radiant be really easy to use for non-technicalcontent editors? I am happy my frustrations resulted in some discussion and good ideas. The ideas for extensions for a scratch pad, filter toolbars and som WymEditor + paperclipped would all be highly usable to me, but I don't have the time to build any of them right now. I have used TinyMCE filter for some projects, but it has - amongst other things - resulted in me having to say to the customer: No, you have to let me edit the frontpage, if you edit it, it will get messed up (Because TinyMCE has a habit of messing HTML up). But WymEditor might be more clean at that, so I think I'll try and use it. The template extension can do many of the things you mention, such as providing custom forms for different templates, and allowing the user to select the appropriate template when clicking Add Child. I'll let you know if I make any interesting discoveries along the way. Med venlig hilsen / Best regards, Casper Fabricius http://casperfabricius.com On 19/11/2008, at 10.19, Simon Rönnqvist wrote: Hi! Yes some WymEditor + paperclipped combination could be really cool. I've never really used WymEditor for any of my clients.. but I've tried both Markdown and a tightly configured TinyMCE (which would be pretty close to WymEditor). With Markdown I've seen that the content remains largely unstyled, the client eg. just used UPPERCASE-letters for headings and so on... maybe a Markdown-toolbar would help stimulate the usage of Markdown-code? With the TinyMCE solution again stuff got marked up a bit inconsistently, and often using strong for some headings, even though it didn't cause quite the mess that a normal 'liberal' WYSIWYG would have. My guess is that using WymEditor would be a good way to give your customer a way to try and express what she's looking for, but chances are that you'll have to go in and clean up after her a few times... but along with that you could also try to agree with her on certain practices in the future, to retain consistency. I've been searching for the perfect solution for quite some time, but I've begun thinking that this last step of cleaning up and educating can't really be avoided if you want perfect results... we can just try to minimize this last task. Markdown+toolbar could also be something to try out, but I fear it might still be considered a bit too intimidating (and Textile I find even more intimidating). Another thing that I've been thinking that could be suitable for some cases (but I haven't tried out) is in-place editing... but I don't know how well that'd fit into Radiant. And yes forms (using your own plug-in) or splitting content into many page parts could definitely also in some cases be the right solution... but in cases where we want to allow more flexibility, to allow the customer to structure their content more freely... we're probably better off going with some WymEditor-like solution + cleaning up and education. Apart from the actual editing of content, it'd be really cool to find and easy way to hide some stuff in Radiant from the customer. Eg. some things such as the CSS and RSS things, and sometimes some page-parts. And maybe in some cases even the popup menus: layout, page type, status and filter. cheers, Simon PS. I begun the search for the perfect solution to this in my thesis, if anyone's interested: http://simon.fi/en/thesis On Nov 18, 2008, at 20:46 , Mohit Sindhwani wrote: Casper Fabricius wrote: 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. Casper, my solution would be to find a slightly more technical client :P No, I'm joking (of course!) Here's what I would recommend: 1. First, factor out as far as possible so that whatever is not page specific is in snippets. 2. If all she needs is a few styles of pages, I would create different page types or layouts. 3. Then tell her that the different parts that she wants need to go into different page parts. It would be cool if you could modify the Add Child behavior to allow you to
Re: [Radiant] Can Radiant be really easy to use for non-technicalcontent editors?
Off topic, possibly... But is that FLEX app open source? Andrew On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 11:28 AM, Marcus Blankenship [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Another thought, crazy as it might be, would be to create a FLEX component that represents a content editor. We do this on some of our flex apps, and it works well. Here's an example: http://cfsilence.com/blog/tips/rte/bin/richTextEditor.cfm This might allow for more control than JS based editors give, I'm not sure. Just another thought, from a FLEX nerd. Marcus -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Casper Fabricius Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2008 10:21 AM To: radiant@radiantcms.org Subject: Re: [Radiant] Can Radiant be really easy to use for non-technicalcontent editors? I am happy my frustrations resulted in some discussion and good ideas. The ideas for extensions for a scratch pad, filter toolbars and som WymEditor + paperclipped would all be highly usable to me, but I don't have the time to build any of them right now. I have used TinyMCE filter for some projects, but it has - amongst other things - resulted in me having to say to the customer: No, you have to let me edit the frontpage, if you edit it, it will get messed up (Because TinyMCE has a habit of messing HTML up). But WymEditor might be more clean at that, so I think I'll try and use it. The template extension can do many of the things you mention, such as providing custom forms for different templates, and allowing the user to select the appropriate template when clicking Add Child. I'll let you know if I make any interesting discoveries along the way. Med venlig hilsen / Best regards, Casper Fabricius http://casperfabricius.com On 19/11/2008, at 10.19, Simon Rönnqvist wrote: Hi! Yes some WymEditor + paperclipped combination could be really cool. I've never really used WymEditor for any of my clients.. but I've tried both Markdown and a tightly configured TinyMCE (which would be pretty close to WymEditor). With Markdown I've seen that the content remains largely unstyled, the client eg. just used UPPERCASE-letters for headings and so on... maybe a Markdown-toolbar would help stimulate the usage of Markdown-code? With the TinyMCE solution again stuff got marked up a bit inconsistently, and often using strong for some headings, even though it didn't cause quite the mess that a normal 'liberal' WYSIWYG would have. My guess is that using WymEditor would be a good way to give your customer a way to try and express what she's looking for, but chances are that you'll have to go in and clean up after her a few times... but along with that you could also try to agree with her on certain practices in the future, to retain consistency. I've been searching for the perfect solution for quite some time, but I've begun thinking that this last step of cleaning up and educating can't really be avoided if you want perfect results... we can just try to minimize this last task. Markdown+toolbar could also be something to try out, but I fear it might still be considered a bit too intimidating (and Textile I find even more intimidating). Another thing that I've been thinking that could be suitable for some cases (but I haven't tried out) is in-place editing... but I don't know how well that'd fit into Radiant. And yes forms (using your own plug-in) or splitting content into many page parts could definitely also in some cases be the right solution... but in cases where we want to allow more flexibility, to allow the customer to structure their content more freely... we're probably better off going with some WymEditor-like solution + cleaning up and education. Apart from the actual editing of content, it'd be really cool to find and easy way to hide some stuff in Radiant from the customer. Eg. some things such as the CSS and RSS things, and sometimes some page-parts. And maybe in some cases even the popup menus: layout, page type, status and filter. cheers, Simon PS. I begun the search for the perfect solution to this in my thesis, if anyone's interested: http://simon.fi/en/thesis On Nov 18, 2008, at 20:46 , Mohit Sindhwani wrote: Casper Fabricius wrote: 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. Casper, my solution would be to find a slightly more technical client :P No, I'm joking (of course!) Here's what I would recommend: 1. First, factor out as far as possible so that whatever is not page specific is in snippets. 2. If all she needs is a few styles of pages, I would create different page types or layouts. 3. Then tell her that the different
RE: [Radiant] Can Radiant be really easy to use for non-technicalcontent editors?
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
