Help! Web Building Tools (used to be called HTML editors)

mindrobots

Oh great wise ones of the forum, I beseech you!

OK, last time I really did anything with HTML, we had Notepad and we liked it!

I have a need to build a web site from scratch for the 4-H. I have a domain registered and a server "spun up" on Nearly Free Speech so, I'm ready to build.

Do you have any suggestions for a WYSIWYG HTML/Site editor/builder? The requirements are as follows:

1) I don't have a lot of free time, so a short learning curve would be nice.
2) It probably needs to be Win7 compatible (multi-platform is cool!)
3) I'm lazy.
4) It will be used my multiple people on multiple computers, so the site source will be on the server, not somebody's PC
5) hopefully mostly used by High School aged "volunteer" Jr. Webmasters
6) the final site should probably have even calendar, typical info/contact/etc pages, a (simple)members forum and maybe blogging capability.
7) did I mention I'm lazy?
8) FREE software - I'm already spending my money on hosting!

NFS also has a bunch of forum software they support, of which I know nothing! Any of these jump out as the WINNER?
bbPress
Eblah
FluxBB
KaReHa
MyBB
NinkoBB
OSQA
phpBB
punBB
SMF
TinyImageBoard
Vanilla
vBulletin
WaKaBa
YaBB

I know this is one of those loaded questions, favorite language, OS, ice cream, etc. but if anything really jumps out as a "only solution" type answer, any help would be appreciated.

Did I mention I'm lazy and there will be Jr. Webmasters involved?

Thanks!!!

localroger

For what you are trying to set up you don't need an editor, you need a package. All of the forum software packages have little web writeups; since you have a list of those known to work on NFS, exercise the Google and pick one which seems to meet your requirements. Bear in mind that the simpler and less capable systems will also be the easiest to set up, customize, and administer.

Also, if your focus is more on disseminating info and announcements and less on freeform forum style discussion, you might want to look into a self-hosted blogging package that NFS supports, such as wordpress, instead of forum software.

mindrobots

Roger,

Thanks for the feedback. The Editor reference is probably more my lack of knowledge than anything else.

I think I do want a real interactive, exchange of ideas Forum with fascinating discussions of Jr. Robotic exploits.

Another possibility, I guess is a content management system (CMS) like Drupal, joomla, etc. another area I have no knowledge about.

Publison

While I have not used it, as localroger said, Wordpress seems to be popular and easy to use. I know Bill Henning uses it:

http://mikronauts.com/

and I think Jeff (OBC) uses it or used it in the past.

Jim

localroger

CMS like Drupal and Joomla will have a much steeper learning curve than a forum package like YABB. More capable = harder to use.

You might also want to consider a combination such as a wordpress blog style front-end for news and announcements with a link to one of the simpler discussion board packages that might otherwise not look so good as the front end.

SRLM

I use SeaMonkey for the editor and ttree for the templating.

Traditionally, most people use Dreamweaver for their website. One of the biggest advantages of Dreamweaver is that you can make templates, and use them to hold consistent information that is site wide. It makes it easy to update. Unfortunately, no open source HTML editor system has anything like it.

The best option that I've found for WYSIWYG is the SeaMonkey editor. It did slightly better than Kompozer in maintaining the layout of current websites. For templating I use a command called ttree. ttree will go in and do sitewide cut and paste, which makes it very easy to make templates. It's fairly easy to use for simple templates (ie, pages with a single "editable" area).

I did some research a few weeks back for somebody who wanted to convert their whole site away from Dreamweaver. They wanted to make it easy for the non-technical to update the site. I've attached the email; you may find it useful.

---

I've taken a look at your website, and here are my recommendations. This is assuming that you cannot remain with Dreamweaver, for whatever reason.

A note about your files that you have now. Your website is composed of (mostly) .html files. What this means is that the files are not "tied" to Dreamweaver specifically. Instead, Dreamweaver is simply a very powerful tool for editing them. There is nothing stopping you from opening them up in some other program (eg notepad) and editing them there. You simply loose some of the more advanced wizards (automatic code generators) that Dreamweaver provides. The main exception to this is Dreamweaver templates (see below).

I would not use Wordpress or it's alternatives at this point. Wordpress (or alternatives like Drupal or LightCMS) is a "Content Management System". They typically require some sort of web server and a database server, and quite a bit of setup to use. Your website right now appears to be mostly HTML, CSS, and JSP which is (relatively speaking) simple and straight forward. It would definitely be possible to move your website to one of these CMSs, but at this point I don't think it's necessary. The advantage to moving is that non-technical administrators can maintain the website much more easily, and in general your website is more flexible (and powerful, eg logins, online shopping, forms, dynamic content, etc.). The disadvantage is that you'll need somebody to put in a significant amount of time to get everything set up, and you'll need to train staff on how to use it.

The best open source editor that I could find for you to modify your website is SeaMonkey. This editor was able to faithfully represent your website and save the files without loss of content. At this point you could create and edit all your web pages yourself with SeaMonkey, and you should be fine. The main competitor to SeaMonkey is Kompozer, but I found that for your website Kompozer completely changed up the formatting in an unusable way.

By switching from Dreamweaver you loose the ability to use the templating function. Your website makes extensive use of this. Some various options are:
--- Stick with Dreamweaver (it is definitely compatible)
--- Don't change the templated portion of your website, ever.
--- Use some sort of custom script to simulate the Dreamweaver template functionality (this is what I do for my web pages. You would have to get a programmer type person to do this for you)
--- Convert to a CMS that has it's own template functionality.

A compromise that would allow you to post dynamic "news" type content would be to use an online blogger system (such as blogspot) to create and edit the content, and then you can embed the feeds in your web pages. This way non-technical users can create and post content in a simple (non-geeky) editor.

You should also look into license restrictions of the Dreamweaver software that you used to create the website. Specifically, I'd check to make sure that academic/trial versions of the software can be used in commercial products. It probably won't ever be an issue but it doesn't hurt to check.

My final recommendation for your website, if you decide that you want to convert away from Dreamweaver, is to edit your files with SeaMonkey, do templating via a custom script, and to have dynamic content updated via an embedded blog tool.

Before I leave, I'd like to mention that you can add tracking to your website to record traffic levels, sources, patterns, etc. I use Google Analytics, and adding it to your website would be very easy regardless of the options that you choose. To add tracking to a webpage simply involves pasting a few lines of code that is provided. It's easy, and informative.

xanadu

I'll add a lot more to this this afternoon but I had to say right now that all of those free forums you mentioned get hacked by automated web 'robots' within a couple weeks of putting them online. There are things you need to do to prevent that from happening. phpBB is one of the worst boards for this problem.

WordPress is not a forum, but it will make a great website. I'd start with WordPress you can have it hosted for free as well. If it has to have a forum you would be better of paying for a hosted forum and using free hosted WordPress.

localroger

Since mindrobots' target demographic is a boy scout troop it should be straightforward for him on any forum package to close random account creation and manually create accounts for those people who are supposed to have access to the site. That's an advantage you don't have when you want to attract random web traffic and should make even the simplest forum software pretty workable.

xanadu

I would still suggest using a free hosted forum. There may be some ads on the page, but when you consider the time you save and also the safeguards in place it's very worthwhile.

Even if you turn off users and comments the sites are very easy to hack using XSS (cross site scripting) and SQL injection. But then what if you want people to be able to sign up or leave comments? I cannot warn you enough about this because I've seen it many, many times in my IT career. Then what happens when you need to upgrade to the latest version? Do you know how to backup your SQL database on your web host? Not updating it is not an option, then you'll be even more vulnerable. Hosted places take care of this for you.

Seeing the number of free places you can host, and you can even point your domain there, unless you focus in on learning how to make and harden web sites there's no reason to not use them.

Typical call. "Jon, we cannot access our email." "Oh really? Okay let me remote into your network and see." - Access denied!

Why? Because they were running phpBB and a spam bot hit it. Now their shared hosted server goes onto a bunch of real time block lists. So I call their host and get them unblocked and they get their email, but now they can't send because that dirty ol shared hosting server is still listed in other RBLs. It's not just phpBB that these vulnerabilities exist on. If you do anything with any box that a user can type into, you're going to need CAPTCHA, or it will be a matter of days before you're hit by an automated bot.

I don't know, maybe I'm just getting lazy. I just don't think you should run it yourself unless that is that part you want to do. If you just want a working functional site and not to deal with all the problems go hosted.

WBA Consulting

I second SRLM: Seamonkey. Even though I mainly use Dreamweaver and a little bit of Wordpress, I still use Seamonkey as a quick editor for simple pages.

localroger

Jon, Mindrobots is hosted on nearlyfreespeech. This isn't quite entirely self-hosted; they have their own specific sql defenses and are very paranoid about attack vectors. This is why there's a list of apps they support; things that break their security and hosting model won't fly.

xanadu

localroger wrote: »

Jon, Mindrobots is hosted on nearlyfreespeech. This isn't quite entirely self-hosted; they have their own specific sql defenses and are very paranoid about attack vectors. This is why there's a list of apps they support; things that break their security and hosting model won't fly.

Oh okay, so the web host installs and maintains it? That's a good option too, a 1 click install in the hosting control panel. I didn't think to ask about the hosting.

Back when I started with internet endeavors people would always ask me about open source CMS. My research consisted of using a search engine to search for the CMS name and the word 'hacked'. I would recommend the one that got hacked the least. Then usually 1 week to a couple months later they came back to me very upset that their board got hacked. This has happened to me so many times whenever anyone asks I just tell them don't bother doing it yourself. That's the only reason I said it I didn't mean to say don't do it, just so he is aware.

mindrobots

Hi, everybody!

Sorry I haven't dropped in on my own thread, I'm getting time-slammed from all "attack vectors"

I need to sit down and try some of these suggestions. Thank you all for the suggestions.

I am on NearlyFreeSpeech so the hosting part has been decided. They are relatively open as long as I stay within their tested software but I believe they are well protected (for their own sake if nohing else).

I don't mind some of the free sites because Adblock Plus takes care of most of that for me but I hate to subject others to it. That is an option I can explore for some features.

I'm kind of a DIY guy (why I don't have much time and don't get much done, probably), if nothing else, it will be a good learning experience!

localroger

Yeah, the way it works on NFS is that if you want to use a package that needs SQL, you don't get to install the server; there's a web panel control that starts the SQL process, and you get billed by the day for running it. You do get to configure, customize, and install the app however you like, but they run the SQL server and access is strictly controlled. They also have defenses which apply to other server-side software you might be running; for example, they warn that if they think you're running an open mail relay, they might cut off your access until you explain yourself. It's really a very interesting hosting model, because you have a lot of nuts and bolts access, the hosting is really cheap unless you get slashdotted (and then it's still cheap compared to other hosts that won't fold up under a slashdotting), and your access is very highly automated with a big emphasis on security and sandboxing.