We had a nice little chat this month. We talked about some job offers that have come in, kcpug’s future, simple content management systems, the need for css and much more. A wrap up and some followup info, all in this month’s pug newsletter.

Job Prospects

JCCC is Hiring! I’ve recently accepted a position at my place of employment, and my old job is needing to be filled. We’re looking for a web application developer with lots of experience, a great attitude, and who is not afraid to do non-developer things. Check out the [url=http://web.jccc.net/hr/jobs/CurrentOpenings.htm]Jobs and Opportunities[/url] of http://jccc.edu for more information.
There were others, but I don’t want to announce them here, unless you want to. You know who you are. 😉

Doug is looking for content management

Doug asked a question like “My clients need a CMS to edit simple websites, but they shouldn’t need to know any html, or anything.”

Helen suggested looking into DreamWeaver templates, as mostly his issue is providing a safty-net from his client’s own…creativity. We all agreed that this would be a good solution for many clients.

The lite section opensourcecms.com was also suggested as a place to look. After the meeting, I found cmsimple and sapid as possible candidates. Sapid looks really, really cool…and appears to be just downright perfect for this. Very clicky/sqishy…although the opensourcecms install is a little horked. Once you are logged in, just append ?mode=edit to the url of any page you want to switch into edit more. The edit button in the toolbar seems to be broken…but again, I’m sure it would work in your own install.

Helen is looking for a single page, easy update solution

The best I could think of was using something like [url=http://www.dynarch.com/projects/htmlarea/]HTMLArea[/url], and let it post to a password-protected php script that would get the html and save the file.

So, say your user’s only saw mypage.php:
mypage.php
[code]

This is my page

include(‘uploaded_page.inc’);

[/code]

Then, write up a simple php script…let’s call it uploader.php. It could draw a form using an html area. It should probably load the uploaded_page.inc file and put it in the html area.
On form submit, write the html-area into uploaded_page.inc.

This should naturally be password protected. You would also want to be careful not to let it write to any other page on your site, etc. But it should be fairly straightforward.

CSS: Any good info?

The topic of CSS came up as well. I’m a huge fan of it, and went on my pre-programmed rant of why it is a good thing. If you are interested, you may want to check on this handful of links:

[url=http://www.tanfa.co.uk/css/layouts/flexi-floats-3col.asp]A great 3 column, stretchy layout[/url]

[url=http://www.tanfa.co.uk/]tanfa in general is a great css reference.[/url]

[url=http://www.alistapart.com/]A list apart[/url]

Specificly, their [url=http://www.alistapart.com/articles/slashdot/]re-writing slashdot[/url] article

Anything Else?

I’m sure I have missed a ton of things. Feel free to add anything I missed, or any additional information as a comment.

See you all next month!!