Posted by Jon on 01/13/06 16:20

All,

I'm currently building sites for a fairly small dev shop, and we've run into
a subject that we simply don't know where to take. So, here we go:

We have built all of our sites statically for the most part, using
Dreamweaver Templates, and provided Contribute for the customer to edit the
site.

So, a while back my boss and our lead dev asked me to look into a Content
Management solution using PHP/MySQL. So, I have built a system (oo design
using classes for all queries) that allows users to add pages, edit their
current pages, etc.

My problem is that our boss is wanting to see a much more dynamic system
that will allow a user to format text WITHOUT using HTML (currently we
provide the customer a small HTML reference guide). After some discussion,
it came back to the fact that maybe we should simply stick with Contribute
and dog the CMS all together.

I have a few questions:

What is everyone's opinion here? Is Contribute still a better solution for
giving customers the ability to update a website? Or are there major
advantages of the CMS I'm not seeing?

Also - is it even possible to build a system that is true WYSIWYG design
that won't use HTML at all for editing? We don't want to just provide a
text-based management system, but our boss doesn't want HTML to be used. Is
there a better way to do this using PHP? Maybe get AJAX involved?

Thank you in advance.

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