On 3/9/99 5:25 PM Pierce T. Wetter III wrote:
> WebObjects is a solution. Golive Publishing System is a solution.
>ArticleBase is a solution. NetObjects is a solution. Perl is a
>solution. Front Page is a solution.
>
> What's your problem?
Okay, so it was a dumb question in that I was not very specific. Our
problem is that our goals can not be obtained easily by just continuing
to write a bunch of perl scripts. Currently we do several sites with
daily changing content. Our news people drop that content into a web
base submission system written as CGI scrpits in Perl which takes that
copy into a page template and generates an html file. A cron job at
midnight replaces the old web pages with the new ones and there you have
it, that's our "system" so far.
For our more brochure ware (read: relatively static) sites, we get copy
from marketing departments etc. and drop it into html the old fashion
way, with BBedit. Our webmaster gives some of this work to Interns as it
is pretty simple stuff and tries to spend his time designing pages.
Our goals are:
1) To be able to have our news editors submit stories via the web or a
thin Mac client without knowing HTML
2) To have our webmaster simply create page templates in BBedit for the
news stories, daily changing front page section, etc.
3) To have our graphics department (we are also a print publisher and
have been for 8 years) create the sites graphics.
4) To have these elements sit in a database and have the pages generated
on the fly as requested. This is not as necessary for brochureware
sites, but would be very helpful for new sites. When something like
"copyright 1998" needs to be changed to "copyright 1999" there are only
15 templates that need to be changed, not 300 static html files.
5) Netobjects is no longer developing their client for the Mac. Site
Server really works better if you are an NT/95/98 house. Rather than
worry about this issue, if it could be as web based as possible that
would be best. A thin web server based web client for 90% of the people
involved in any site is a goal with that other 10% using anything else
necessary- probably BBedit. We have a lot invested in Macintosh
hardware because we began in the print world with Macs and Quark Express
(which has the Quark Publishing System by the way)
Notes: We don't care what it is served off of- I work with Solaris,
Linux, NT, and Mac mainly though. My point is that we are not trying to
keep 100% Mac as this is not only crazy but impossible, but we do want to
keep 90% of the desktop machines Mac.
I guess I'm in a situation where I can't describe exactly what we want
because all I know is that the way we are doing things now is not
scalable. We do everything manually.
Maybe I need some case studies with WebObjects and Go Live, Webobjects
and Article Base, or maybe I just need to look at some 100% custom
solutions written in a WebObjects environment.
-p
--
Lewis Pennock
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.lewis.net
