Some help on creating web pages.



  • Recently, I've gotten a job at a college newspaper to update their website weekly with the new articles from that week's issue.  The existing way of doing this is to create a new blank page from a template and manually copy the contents of each article from the InDesign file to the page, repeating this for each article.

    This seems to me like there has got to be an obvious way of automating a good deal of the formatting and repetition, but as I've got very little web development experience, I'm uncertain how to go about it.  Does anyone here have any suggestions on which way to point me? I was considering the possibility of replacing the site entirely with an existing content management system (such as PostNuke); would this be a realistic possibility? Any comments would be appreciated.



  • Well, how do they store there articles?



  • currently just a PDF of the completed paper and indesign files for each section.



  • @kertrats said:

    currently just a PDF of the completed paper and indesign files for each section.

    Youch. That's "yikes" and "ouch." Understandable, but not optimal. You're not going to find an easy way to get that into a CMS, but at least a CMS will make the copy & pasting easier than the old HTML template way.

    Ideally they would set up some sort of workflow where the article texts are stored somewhere in a plain text format, and then pulled into the InDesign layouts (InDesign is fairly good at this). Then you would have a CMS pull the same text for publishing on the website.



  • While we're on the CMS subject, can you recommend any good, free PHP CMS? Currently I'm running a site on something that dares to call itself a CMS and is a giant WTF with program and presentation code scattered in bits around numerous files. It uses register_globals and spews such garbage that it's a miracle that FF and IE actually manage to display this decently. I was thinking about Joomla, but it's so elephantine that learning its structure would take me at least two months, and there is not much in-depth documentation, just how-to-make-a-mod tutorials. I'm looking for something very simple that would be easy to modify directly (as opposed to by plugins).



  • @Tweenk said:

    While we're on the CMS subject, can you recommend any good, free PHP CMS? Currently I'm running a site on something that dares to call itself a CMS and is a giant WTF with program and presentation code scattered in bits around numerous files. It uses register_globals and spews such garbage that it's a miracle that FF and IE actually manage to display this decently. I was thinking about Joomla, but it's so elephantine that learning its structure would take me at least two months, and there is not much in-depth documentation, just how-to-make-a-mod tutorials. I'm looking for something very simple that would be easy to modify directly (as opposed to by plugins).

    One of my favorite PHP CMSs has been TextPattern. It's not nearly as big as Joomla or *Nuke (thank God), but it does still have plugins. It's really nice.l


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