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Vanilla 1.1.5a is a product of Lussumo. More Information: Documentation, Community Support.
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I'm in the middle of the most extensive website I've ever done... It's for a high school. Here's my issue: they have a terrible website right now, but it's updated with news and other tidbits just about every single day. They want me to come up with a modern look, which I've done, but they still want to be able to update the site daily without needing any assistance from me (which I need, also, because I certainly can't afford to spend time updating their site every day). They want to be able to add, for example, announcements to the home page. That's not a big deal. They also want to be able to change the fonts, sizes, and colors of those announcements. The person who updates the site knows nothing but a little bit of FrontPage WYSIWYG, and really doesn't understand anything about CSS. I tried to explain that they could have me define styles, or they could define styles themselves, and then simply give the announcement a class, but that concept was too much to grasp.
I don't know what to do. I'm starting to feel like they're asking for things I simply can't provide, but I hate to bail on the project now. I'm also worried that if I accomplish what they want, the site is going to end up looking terrible because the person who updates it doesn't have good taste (not my words).
Do you have any suggestions for me? -
Setup some sort of content management system for the announcements. Have a WYSIWYG with your CSS styles in it. Then you can sort of control the crap that they would produce with the WYSIWYG.
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With something like Wordpress as your CMS, you can easily setup the WYSIWYG formatting bar to your liking. In fact the Wordpress formatting bar is courtesy of http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/
You might: only allow text to be left formatted, or made bold - but never italic, or red, or blinking in 30 point, etc etc... You can also add dropdown menus that allow you to apply your own CSS styles to the selected text.
Make sure that you are charging extra for this though, it's a good deal of work to convert your site to be content managed. -
I was about to say use TinyMCE and a little php. All you have to do is have it write to a text file or something and do an include statement. PHP makes all of our lives easier.
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The site's not done in PHP. The site's done in Ruby on Rails. I guess what I'm most worried about is turning over my site to somebody who doesn't have any clue what they're doing. I know that I can write it off because I will have completed my task to satisfaction, but it's unnerving nonetheless.
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CommentAuthoradjustafresh
- CommentTimeFeb 20th 2007
varland - when dealing with technically ignorant clients who will be publishing content to a website through a CMS it is important to give them as little room as possible to break things. It is also helpful to create a style guide that will give users of the CMS guidelines for how to create and style content. If you set up rules for how content will be styled, you can obviously control those styles via a style sheet.
Try explaining the importance of a unified look and feel, and that allowing any individual to style content in any manner they see fit will destroy and consistency of the site. You can also present it as a usability issue. For example, novice web content publishers often use underlining to add emphasis to a word. Underlining clearly indicates a hyperlink which can cause confusion to end-users. -
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Varland,
Take a look at Article Manager (http://www.interactivetools.com/products/articlemanager/). I have used this on half a dozen sites and it works extremely well, and is easy to install and use. Each news article/announcement can follow the Stylesheet you set up or can be individually coloured/re-sized by any authorised user. -
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CommentAuthorindonesia1
- CommentTimeFeb 21st 2007 edited
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- CommentAuthoraxe_sosharp
- CommentTimeFeb 22nd 2007
Think I smell spiced pig!!!!!!
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