Chris,
One way would be to give each employee a user account, with a shell of
/bin/false (so they or bad people, can't telnet in and use that account) a
home directory, and under their home directory put a public_HTML sub
directory. Any files they upload into the public_HTML will be viewable by
http://www.yourdomain.com/~username. Where username is their username of
the account. If they put an index.HTML in the public_HTML directory that
will be viewed by default. Setup an ftp server though inetd (if it isn't
already) and have them ftp to yourdomain.com and upload their files there.
Alot of ISP are doing it this way. Also make sure you setup quotas on your
/home directory (or where the username accounts home directory are) so that
you can have some control against users uploading massive amounts of
information to the server.
If your users are running Windows XX machines and you have a smb network
setup, you could run Samba (http://www.samba.org) on the Linux machine and
share each users public_HTML directory across the network. This way they
could just drag and drop their HTML pages to the server.
If your users are running Unix or Unix like workstations you could setup a
NFS (Network File System) share and then the users would be able to copy
their HTML pages across the network instead of going though ftp.
You could also write a custom CGI program that would allow users to upload
and delete files in their public_html though a standard web browser
(Netscape Navigator 2.0 or higher or Internet Explore 3.0 or higher or Hot
Java, Opera, etc, etc) (doesn't work with Lynx). I do have some Perl code
available that can do this, but it would have to be modified to work with
more then one user account and security would have to be reviewed,
especially in a multi-user envoriment. Let me know if you want this code
and I will check it, tar it and send it over for you.
Above describes how to upload to the servers, as for creating the web pages,
they can be done in any standard ASCII text edit (ie. vi, pico, emacs, joe
on Unix systems or edit.com, notepad.exe on Windows XX systems, etc.) but
this would require your users to know HTML. If they do, they can create
HTML on their workstations and upload them, or you could give them a shell
of /bin/bash (or similar) and they could telnet in and edit the files
directory on the system (this way they won't have to upload them).
If they don't know HTML, you can find alot of different programs called HTML
editors. They are usually GUI programs and they allow the user to "Click
here to include image" which is usually easier for most users. If you go to
http://www.freshmeat.net and do a search for HTML editors, alot of them will
come up for Linux. If your users are on Unix workstations or x terminals
you could have them run the HTML editor program off the server and have it
displayed on there workstation, this way you only have to install, maintain
and upgrade one program, instead of Y times the amount of employees you have
at your site. If they don't have access to Unix workstations or x terminals
you should be able to find HTML editors for the OS they are running,
WindowsXX and MacOS X have alot of them, but you have to install, maintain,
configure, upgrade each program for each employee on everyone of their
workstations.
A third option for creating web pages, is the create a cgi script that would
be able to directly edit the users web page, from a web browser, like
http://www.anglefire.com. There are a couple of them out there, which most
of them don't give enough options to the user creating the web page. If
you want to go this way check out http://www.cgi-resources.com . If you
find a decent one that allows for alot of options and the user can create a
broad range of different web pages, please let me know. I don't think you
would be able to find a piece of "software in a can", but it would have to
be more of a custom job for this type of problem. If you write one please
let me know. You should also consider releasing it under the GPL
(http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.txt)
Above are some ideas, there is always more than one way to do things :)
Depending on your site requirments and users some methods may work better
than other, find which works best for your site and build apond on that.
Jack Barnett
----- Original Message -----
From: chris Job <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, November 24, 1999 9:07 PM
Subject: Website question
> Hi folks....
> I am in the process of setting up and intranet. I'm using Red Hat 5.2
> and have most of the basics working including my Apache web server. I've
> been doing alot of reading and still at a loss as to what is the best way
> to allow my fellow employees access to the web server so that they can
> create and upload their own web pages? I am looking for suggestions as to
> what software to use for creating and uploading web pages and the best
> of going about the whole process. What should I take into consideration
> as I move forward.
> Thank
> Chris
