Ask Slashdot: Web Site Editing Software For the Long Haul? 545
MouseR writes "It seems we can't rely on software, in particular Web site editing software, to exist for the long haul. Every time I rely on something, it takes only a couple of years before it gets trashed. I have used GoLive's CyberStudio before it got engulfed as GoLive from Adobe. Both got trashed. I eventually used Apple's .Mac HomePage. It got trashed and replaced with iWeb. I then used iWeb, hosted on MobileMe, and Apple just killed it again, along with the hosting. So, as I'm preparing to move my stuff on various web sites, onto my own hosting server (outsourced), I'm wondering what kind of visual web site editor(s) I could use, for the long haul. I'm rather sick of changing tools every other year and as a software developer, would rather spend my time editing my web site rather than code it. Any suggestions?"
Utopia Framework (Score:3, Interesting)
Hi, I had the same problem so I made the Utopia Framework [oriontransfer.co.nz]. This is a simple tool which allows you to create website content directly. While not really ready wide adoption, I've been maintaining it (originally PHP, now Ruby) for over 10 years, and it's core ideas are (IMHO) very easy to understand and very powerful. The biggest issue right now is documentation.
Open Source CMS (Score:4, Interesting)
Surprised nobody has mentioned this yet, but there are many good open source CMS's that allow you to edit your website through browser based tools -- Drupal, Joomla, etc. My company has built our own CMS that allows wysiwyg editing of websites (which I won't plug). The point is, for the long haul and for a lot of reasons a browser-based solution is best. And no matter what happens to an open source project you can always continue to use the code and extend it for as long as you want.
Migrating from visual editing to hand coding. (Score:5, Interesting)
So I did. I throttled down my workload and taught myself how to hand code everything. Sure that first year was miserable but I've since put together a rapid development framework that allows me to turn a custom design to a working Wordpress theme in about a business day. The end result is less headaches, a more refined workflow and sites that actually validate.
Sure, I still rely upon an IDE for my development and most of the Mac IDEs are highly imperfect and rarely updated (Looking at you Coda, Textmate and Espresso), but at least my general workflow remains unchanged. Therefore should I need to drop Espresso and move to the (perpetually) forthcoming Coda 2, I'll be able to make that migration without much trouble.
Sorry, but what rock have you been living under? (Score:2, Interesting)
Sorry, but what rock have you been living under?
The number one visual web development tool for more than a decade now has been and still is Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is the reason Adobe dropped GoLive after aquiring Macromedia, since they didn't want two tools for the same segment under their roof. And it was the right decision to make Dreamweaver the prime choice.
If you need a visual web development tool, Dreamweaver is the way to go. If you're using a Mac, as I take you are, Freeway Pro and RapidWeaver are maybe alternatives.
Management of Adobe? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are new versions that don't fix old bugs and insufficiencies, but cost a lot. Sometimes when you buy a CD of Creative Suite, you get software on the CD that is many months old, and requires downloading the newest version.
Re:Notepad (Score:4, Interesting)
the only way I know to do it now is to to re-edit every single one of those 100,000+ pages.
This is why you don't write your pages in straight HTML ;-)
That doesn't answer your question, though. So let's go through some possible ways of doing it.
The first, most obvious way is to edit a menu into every single page in the same place. You can do the same with the headers and footers too. That's a lot of copy-and-paste, though. Some editors will let you expand out a macro, so in your static text you'd put some suitably flagged thing like **MENU** that won't appear in real text. You then cook up the pages from tagged body text and upload them. This works, but is tedious. If you change one thing in a common block of text, then you have to recreate and upload the entire site every time. This is how Actinic E-Commerce used to work, I don't know if it still does. It sucks.
Okay, so how about some means of including the menu from a single file? Back in the day, we used to use Server-Side Includes. Rename your page to my_beachball_collection.shtml and stick a line like
to insert the menu. This doesn't always work, especially if SSI isn't enabled. There's an excellent chance your host has PHP though, so instead you do this:
Great! But before long you work out that actually it might be easier to just write the body text and have an index.php file that reads it in with a line like
and a URL like http://mysite.me/index.php?page=my_beachball_collection - and this works perfectly. Until someone feeds it http://mysite.me/index.php?page=../../../etc/shadow and of course because your misconfigured server is running as root, it serves up your shadow password file.
Or, you could put the pages into a database, and then use a query like
. Then you have URLs like the ones before, but you don't let people read files, you feed the content from a database. This works, except you're Sony so someone feeds it http://mysite.me/index.php?page='; UPDATE PAGES SET body="0wned"; and wipes out all your content since you didn't sanitise the database strings, or set up sane database permissions.
At which point, you give up and just install Drupal.
Re:Notepad (Score:3, Interesting)
Where find ~/website. | wc -l
returns 48109 files.
Please get back to me when you can do that by hand, thanks~