Gadgetopia

check out this editor that I just found the other day, it looks pretty nice

http://themaninblue.com/experiment/widgEditor/

so how about Nvu? http://www.nvu.com/

it's open-sorce, it's multiplatform and it's based on Mozilla Composer

Check nvu.com - its based on the Gecko engine (like Mozilla Composer) and is for Linux and Windows. Its work in progress but has many features.

oops, synchronous posting.

I loved to give around Frontpage Express to Newbies -looked like word and did not have much possibillities to screw up. Basically, you could do a normal website in it in wysinwyg. Perhaps not to sophisticated with blinkenlights, but it was easy.

NVU misses some basic principles and is not fool proof enough. Nicole

Other than Nvu ( see the lead developers blog at http://glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?Nvu ), you might want to check out

Mozile (http://mozile.mozdev.org/) "Mozile or Mozilla Inline Editor is an in-browser, context-sensitive, XHTML editor that allows a user to edit all or just specific editable sections of any XHTML page from the comfort of his own browser. It can act as the client-side of a content-editing system or as a self-contained "web word processor"

I'm not sure if it's good for your needs specifically, but I've always thought (and have never been able to test) that Namo WebEditor would be a good novice HTML editor. http://www.namo.com/products/webeditor/

Could you help me better understand your experiences with Contribute?

Try this - Pablo's WebBuilder. Freeware - only 250 Kb. http://www.pablovandermeer.nl/downloads.html

Just read about this on Eoff's Kosher Freeware blog - good free stuff http://eoff.blogspot.com/

I forgot about Pablo. He based his off of FrontPage Express, according to his site.

As for Contribute, I remember trying to edit a single file on my desktop once, and I was unable to. Contribute required me to set up a "site," and connect to it. I think something was broken whereby it would only accept FTP credentials too, because I specifically remember thinking, "Holy cats, if you don't have an FTP site, you can't use this thing..."

(Hey, Deeje beat me here! ;-)

Ditto on the "like to know more about Contribute problems", thanks... I'm not sure whether voodoo was required for your own installation, or whether it was more about setting up a connection key for a non-technical editor, or....

(Use of Dreamweaver can be very helpful when setting up protected regions in pages, and exposing only certain areas for editing by content specialists, but you can also specify those template regions in a regular text editor if you prefer... here are the ranges of editability you can expose, as well as the HTML comments which constrain Contribute editability: http://www.macromedia.com/go/16347 .)

""Holy cats, if you don't have an FTP site, you can't use this thing..."" Yes, the tool is really designed for easy editing of actual HTML files on a server... more info here: http://www.macromedia.com/go/16673

Either FTP or HTTP transfer will work, but setting up a connection is one of the big upfront tasks... there are troubleshooting guides available by searching the Macromedia site with terms like "contribute http ftp".

A big difference between Macromedia Contribute and the Composer/Nvu is that concept of protected regions, and the knowledge that a clumsy content author can't mangle the page itself.

Regards, John Dowdell Macromedia Support

Can Contribute work without a "Connection"? Can I just open a random HTML file on my hard drive, edit, and save it? This is what I was having problems with.

(You Macromedia folks must watch Feedster like hawks...)

Here's my thing with "editable regions" and such --

If I have a design that depends so completely on specific things being in specific spots, then that's something I want to content manage. I mean, if the users aren't allowed to color outside the lines anyway, then I say wrap a database around that stuff.

John and deeje, you guys may want to consider adding support for sftp, FTP-SSL/TLS, or WebDAV over HTTPS to future versions of Contribute. Many systems admins (myself included) are working on eliminating FTP from their networks completely, since it's clear text, tough to route, and most FTP servers have poor security histories. If you choose things carefully, you can go without any sort of FTP server at all these days.

Ideally, all the tools that connect to my servers would support SFTP with public/private key authentication.

Contribute works more like a web browser than like a file system explorer. If you're running a local web server then you can browse to and publish local files, but that's a special case of having files served in the normal way. Details are in that previous citation: http://www.macromedia.com/go/16673

Yes, constructing a database, and constructing templates for on-demand merging of database with markup, and then constructing some type of (usually non-WYSIWYG) editing environment to modify the database, that's another popular approach. Contribute's specialty is in easy, safe editing of regular HTML pages.

Joe, I know that transport protocols were beefed up in initial versions to satisfy requests from early customers... if you've got a need for further protocols then describing your situation to the team directly could help greatly, thanks in advance: http://www.macromedia.com/go/wish

jd/mm

And to follow up on John's comments, Contribute 3 supports LAN, FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, and WebDAV over SSL, on both Windows and Mac OS X. I hope you'll give Contribute another look :-)

And yes, with Contribute 3, you can open local files for edit, without needing a connection.

Hey,

This weblog entry was very interesting for me, not just because it was about Contribute, but also because it demonstrated something I think we all see coming: tech support via weblogs, or blogsupport. It would be great for us all if you blogged about this from your perspective.

peace

deeje

Just for giggles, I put Nvu on a USB flash drive, and it worked. I copied the entire "Program Files" directory from my C: drive to the Flash drive. Then I plugged the drive into a computer that did not have Nvu installed, and ran the executable off the Flash drive.

I looked in the program directory, and there are a ton of DLLs in there, so it much be statically-ish compiled (packaged?) -- it has all its libraries in the same directory and doesn't depend on anything external to that directory.

http://blocknote.net - is an HTML Word Processor. If somebody needs it as a component then it is also available here http://terrainformatica.com/htmengine