Hi again, If you are going to look at something like Contribute, I would say that you are far better going with NetObjects Fusion. I use it for rapid prototyping, but it is basically a CMS as a stand-alone application. You can get it for US$199.95, which is not a lot for you to pay or for each of your clients to pick up a copy also.
Basically there are four windows; 1. Structure. This is where you use a simple flowchart-looking interface to layout all of the pages on the site. You also set the heading, filename, file extensions etc here on a page by page basis. Each 'page' can be colour coded so you can see what it's status is at any given time. The best part is, if you want to move pages (or whole sections) around you just drag and drop them wherever you want them in the structure! 2. Templates. This is where you can pick a pre-built site template, or build a new one from scratch. You pick all the fonts, sizes, colours, background images etc here also. Once you have done it once or twice it can take only a few minutes to build your own (excluding the development of any template image assets). 3. Pages. You start in structure mode, then click on one of the pages you created there and it takes you to the actual page (after applying the template you chose to the page, and filling in the stuff it knows like the page heading etc). From here you have a Word-like interface where you can drag-and-drop images, text boxes, form elements etc etc etc. Each element type has a stack of settings that you can modify in order to give you almost 100% control of your site. From here you can also choose for the page to have a different look-and-feel to the standard template and so on also. Any modification in 'global' regions, or to the template, are immediately reflected across the whole site, and all you have to do is press one button to update the content on the web. 4. Publishing. This is where you set all of the FTP details and other rules for publishing. You have access to the HTML and CSS of every page/element, of course, but the code it generates is actually quite reasonable. The reason I think that it might be good for you is that it stores * everything* in a single file (.nod), so you could create the entire site (including setting publishing targets etc) and just provide them with a copy of the software and the .nod file at the end for them to manage themselves. Seriously, if you can use Word you can use this (especially once it is all set up). The only real problem is that it is a client application, and I don't think it has a web interface. If you decide to give it a shot, and you don't think it suits your needs, you will get an truly-brilliant rapid prototyping tool for a tiny US$199.95! Luck, dp. On 7/11/07, James Gollan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The one alternative that can be worth considering is Contribute > (Adobe) which I used for one project. It's quite lightweight and easy > to get to grips with but is not a proper CMS -- it just lets users > edit existing pages and create new ones. The main problem with it is > there is an additional cost overhead The cost of the contribute software is $200-250. When you compare this to the additional costs of developing a site using a full CMS it probably isn't unreasonable > for the end-user who has to buy > the software (and presumably upgrade it at some point) I don't think that you would need to upgrade - the version I used (admittedly a long time ago) would still work today, just without some of the cooler features. Of course, Adobe have really integrated more recent releases with Dreamweaver these days. This could be a bit of a turn-off as a developer. As for the learning curve, I agree totally. The learning curve, particularly with packages such as Drupal, is huge. But then again, the first CSS site that you create has a huge learning curve that, once climbed, reaps huge benefits. I actually find it quicker to develop a site in a CMS than as static pages due to the modularity of the whole process - changes to the HTML structure can be made to the whole site very quickly, and little things like the link to the current page are automatically assigned a class. These things make a big difference. ************************************************************** Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] **************************************************************
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