Question

Adding CMS functionality to an existing web site

Asked by: don0don

Does anyone know of an open course CMS application that would allow integration of CMS functionality into an existing web site built with Dreamweaver 4.0? In other words, we're trying to avoid rebuilding the entire web site in order to add CMS funtionality.

Alternatively, does anyone know of a Dreamweaver 4.0 add-on that we could use to add CMS functionality to our existing web site?

Our web site is hosted on a UNIX (Solaris) server, so PHP and MySQL are supported.

Thanks!

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Asked On
2007-08-22 at 10:33:46ID22780088
Tags

cms

,

existing

,

add

,

site

,

adding

Topics

Web Authoring

,

WebApplications

,

Adobe Dreamweaver

Participating Experts
3
Points
125
Comments
7

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Answers

 

by: jason1178Posted on 2007-08-22 at 10:58:16ID: 19748269

Hi don0don,

What sort of CMS functionality are you looking to add?  There really isn't a package out there that will work with existing sites, but there are a bunch of open source CMS applications.  Joomla appears to be the most popular one at the moment.

Perhaps a more in-depth explanation of what you are planning to do would help us to help you.

 

by: don0donPosted on 2007-08-22 at 11:49:49ID: 19748716

Our web site: Http://www.lrcsc.org

We have a few pages on our web site that require fairly regular updating, including an "Employment" page where job postings are published; a "Benefits" page with links to documents about eligibility standards that may require periodic updating; and a "Training" page where links to current training calendars are posted. We will also shortly be adding a "News" page where press releases are posted. We are looking for a way to enable the folks responsible for that content to update the content on the web site, rather than having one person (namely, me) have to use Dreamweaver 4.0 to do all this updating.

I hope that clarifies the picture.

Thanks!

 

by: don0donPosted on 2007-08-22 at 11:52:21ID: 19748745

Pardon the error: Not a "Benefits" page, but rather an "Eligibility" page.

 

by: R_HosPosted on 2007-08-22 at 12:29:59ID: 19749030

for something as small as this a full blown CMS effort would probably be beyond what you want to invest time wise.  

A fairly simple solution would be to split your existing pages into two parts (both of the areas you mentioned sit inside of tables which will make this really easy), the first element would be your formatting (call it a template page), the basic elements which will not change often and the second is a 'content well'.

The 'content well' would be a separate HTML file that would be included by the template page, which could easily be edited using any number of free tools.  I'm a little partial to http://www.fckeditor.net/

there are several ways to include your content well into the template:  http://www.webmaster.crevier.org/tags/faq15.html is a pretty good explanation of a number of ways.

Things to think about are:
1 how you would store changes to your content well pages
2 how are you going to secure your site to prevent unauthorized users from making changes to the 'content well'
3. (a subset of 1 really) are you going to store changes to the content well so you can revert back and forth and if so how will you accomplish that?
4. is there going to be some kind of approval chain for changing the content?
5. what technologies does your hosting solution provide

Everything here can be accomplished with a wide variety of technologies dependent on you experience and budget.  I'm a fan of Coldfusion but its a pretty expensive solution, pearl or PHP would probably be better solutions cost wise and since your site is hosted on a UNIX box running Apache you can skip over the Microsoft products.

If your looking at maybe a slightly larger project that would enable you to do pretty much everything I listed above in the things to think about and so much more you might want to take a look at Plone http://plone.org/ which is very powerful and very easy to configure through the user interface...

~R

 

by: jason1178Posted on 2007-08-22 at 13:09:19ID: 19749296

Another way to go is to configure a CMS app in subdirectories of the site so you gain the functionality there but not over the whole thing.  But I agree with R_Hos in that this sounds like overkill for your needs.

You could also look into using Adobe Contribute to allow certain users to edit pages based on permissions you grant, but that's not a free solution.  It works well with DW, though.

 

by: Computer101Posted on 2007-11-04 at 13:36:15ID: 20212384

Forced accept.

Computer101
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20120131-EE-VQP-002

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