Greetings to everyone. I’m more like a designer than a webmaster and I’ve spent a month designing something unique and artistic in HTML5&JS for a customer. It’s responsive and works in every navigator, platform and operating system. Gosh, it’s like it has its own life.
Today I receive an email from my customer saying she wants editable fields in a section of the contact/pricing subpage. I can’t say no, it’s my best customer. If I had a gun in my mouth I would pull the trigger.
The deadline is very soon and I have no time to remake the whole website for Wordpress or any other CMS management system. Is there any way to place an applet, a script, or whatever, into the HTML code and make it easy to edit for her? Like an addon, wordpress based, allowing me to grab text from somewhere else (like a blogger site she can easily log in?) and place it in the exact spot of my website where she wants it?
Something just came to my mind. What about a hidden form in a hidden url (like www.mywebsite.com/dont/enter/here/surprise.php) that edits a txt file? Can I paste some code into the pricing table so it reads numbers from that txt file?
I would say there must be a way, I’m just too ignorant and confused to find it. I beg your help.
Thank you.
There are some really nice, simple CMSes that integrate with your static HTML site, which I think would be perfect here. Probably the best of them is Perch. You install it on your server and just add in editable regions on your pages where the client wants to be able edit stuff. Then they log in to a new section of the site where they can add in content and even add new pages if you let them).
There are some online services that do a similar thing, like CushyCMS, which are even easier, but you have to give them your login details, and I’m not so keen on that and using a third party service that could disappear (although they’ve been around for a long time).
I’d say you should tell your client that you should have known that before you started making the site. That implementing a CMS isn’t something you can just do without changing the whole configuration of the site, and that that involves additional techniques that are costly, in terms of labor.
I just created a CMS that is much, much more user-friendly than all other CMSs there are, including the ones Ralph linked to, but even that very probably involves a very different set-up of the site. Plus a good working knowledge or Javascript and PHP (not SQL).
That’s not really true for the CMSes I linked to above. You can leave your site exactly as is and just add in a few extra bits where needed using those.
That would surprise me, because Perch states on its home page: “Perch will run on any hosting that has PHP 5.3 or above and MySQL.” That suggests that the to-edit files or file parts are stored in a database. Which would requite a whole different set-up of the site.
No, that’s the beauty of it. As I mentioned, you can just build a completely static site and then install Perch on your server (e.g in the root folder of the site). You then open any page on your static site that you’d like to make editable, and add in some simple tags to create an editable area. Perch doesn’t control the whole site, just areas you make editable.
As it has grown, new features have been added in, like the ability to create a blog etc, although it still follows the same principle of integrating with your exiting, static pages.
Also any content that the user enters through the CMS—which is then fed into pages that it’s pointed to. If you removed the CMS, you’d still have the static site, except with missing content here and there—any that was stored in MySQL and pulled into the pages via the CMS.
Thanks for the info. Which makes me think that my CMS is better. Although, like I already wrote, my CMS does require a particular site configuration, cannot be added to a regularly constructed site.
