I've been using ActivEdit for a small Content Management System I am building for my company's intranet. Overall, it's a pretty good product. I'll give you some pros and cons that I've found with it.
Pros: - Super easy to drop into your application - Good documentation - Great online support - Maybe most importantly, it's interface is a "Microsoft Word"-type environment, which reduces any potential learning curve for non-techies because they're used it Word (usually!) - Encrypted version without spell-check is only $99, which if you consider how much time you'd spend developing your own tool is well worth the cost. Cons: - Only work on IE. From what they have said, v3.0 (it's at 2.5 now) is supposed to support Nutscrape and Macs and is due out soon. But they've been quiet about a specific release date to this point. - Have run into problems if I allow the user to use the "Back" button in their browser. It gives some include file error, and the page display gets all messed up. - Cutting and pasting from MS Word is possible but annoying because of all the crap code that Word generates. Not ActivEdit's fault, but still something to consider. I'm sure you students will want to use Word to first write the docs first. - JS integration is annoying. Because of the underlying mechanisms of how the tool works (hidden textareas and stuff), you can't do an onSubmit form validation check. Not terrible because you can use buttons that call JS functions, but it's just annoying because that's not documented and took me forever to figure out!! To answer your questions: 1. It depends on the length of your documents and what you mean by "small paragraphs." Personally, I use CFFILE to create an HTML file with the content and then store the file name in the database. I'd rather not have my DB doing intensive large field returns. 2. I think my answer to number 1 fits here as well. 3. Nah, you're not off-base at all. You just have to properly plan your app and get a good feel for the types of documents people are going to want to create. My suggestion would be to download the ActivEdit trial version and read through the documentation. I was uneasy about the product until I did this and have save myself tons of work by using this tag. Hope this helps, Dave. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tangorre, Michael T." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "CF-Talk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, February 08, 2002 08:25 PM Subject: CF and Active edit > Hello. > > I was wondering if anyone used activeedit from www.cfdev.com . > I was thinking that it may work for my following issue: > > I have alot of people on campus that want documents and little paragraphs > online, but they want to be able to edit and format them whenever they want. > The kicker is that they do not want anyone to do it but them and they also > do not know HTML or any WYSWYG editors. I thought maybe they could copy and > paste their information into a text area on a form, editing it with active > edit, then I could store that in a DB (SQL Server 2K) and then output it > from there. > > I am not sure of a few things: > > 1. Could this be too much information to store in a DB? > 2. Would it be better to write the formatted text area to a text file then > just include it? > 3. Am I just way off base and this is not possible :-) > > Thanks for any input. > > ______________________________________________________________________ Why Share? Dedicated Win 2000 Server � PIII 800 / 256 MB RAM / 40 GB HD / 20 GB MO/XFER Instant Activation � $99/Month � Free Setup http://www.pennyhost.com/redirect.cfm?adcode=coldfusionc FAQ: http://www.thenetprofits.co.uk/coldfusion/faq Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/index.cfm?sidebar=lists
