Ask Slashdot: Web Site Editing Software For the Long Haul?

MouseR writes "It seems we can't rely on software, in particular Web site editing software, to exist for the long haul. Every time I rely on something, it takes only a couple of years before it gets trashed. I have used GoLive's CyberStudio before it got engulfed as GoLive from Adobe. Both got trashed. I eventually used Apple's .Mac HomePage. It got trashed and replaced with iWeb. I then used iWeb, hosted on MobileMe, and Apple just killed it again, along with the hosting. So, as I'm preparing to move my stuff on various web sites, onto my own hosting server (outsourced), I'm wondering what kind of visual web site editor(s) I could use, for the long haul. I'm rather sick of changing tools every other year and as a software developer, would rather spend my time editing my web site rather than code it. Any suggestions?"

Comments

Notepad

[cgeys]

Before someone comes in putting down all the IDE's and tools for web designing and suggests Notepad, let me just say this - no, notepad is not replacement for a good, solid IDE.

Re:Notepad

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but vim is!

Re:Notepad

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, Notepad++ is.

Re:Notepad

[grcumb]

Before someone comes in putting down all the IDE's and tools for web designing and suggests Notepad, let me just say this - no, notepad is not replacement for a good, solid IDE.

Notepad is not only a useless HTML editor, it's a useless text editor. Use a real one and you'll see the virtue of this argument.

EMACS or vi on a decent Unix/linux workstation is your IDE. I challenge any web developer to keep up with me in site design and updating. You might be able to stay with me on a trivial site with a couple of pages/templates, but I guarantee you that as soon as you start working on anything non-trivial (like the 100,000+ static documents I currently administer), a real text editor and the basic set of *nix utilities will leave any IDE looking weak and impoverished.

Re:Notepad

[jellomizer]

For Web Development a good IDE is actually quite useless. Unless you want your website to look obviously from your IDE your better off using standard text editors. I have had some forced time in an IDE where I needed it to make HTML, I had to spend twice as much time working around it to get stuff done.
That said, a modern IDE is nice in terms that if you don't try to build your html visually, they often have JavaScript or the server side language development debugging. Notepad++ VIM or Emacs with the appropriate modules installed can work quite efficiently

Re:Notepad

[realityimpaired]

Even good coders have off days. I used to prefer writing all the code/scripts in Notepad, but switched to Geany because of the automatic syntax checking and formatting. It's not that I'm not capable of doing it right myself, it's because it makes it easier to find typos.

As for my answer to the OP's question, if he's got database access, he's best off installing a CMS of his choice, and using that to do his website. It'll make updates easier, and he won't have to worry about his program of choice going the way of the dodo, because he can always keep it installed on his system.

Re:Notepad

[Chas]

Before someone comes in putting down all the IDE's and tools for web designing and suggests Notepad, let me just say this - no, notepad is not replacement for a good, solid IDE.

No. Notepad isn't a replacement for an IDE (of whatever caliber). It is CLEARLY superior.

Most IDEs (and all the PhotoChoppers out there) with their top-down development do nothing but produce reams of hackish code bloat that doesn't work well cross-platform or in terms of accessibility. Worse, these sites consume many many times the bandwidth, load dogshit slow, and tend to look like crap on anything other than the dev's machine.

It's a shitty excuse for NOT knowing how to code the site from scratch (or at least a basic template).

It's a shitty excuse for having zero compliance with accessibility guidelines and using eye-blinding color pallettes and microscopic font sizes and typefaces CLEARLY unsuitable for web presentation.

It's a shitty excuse for having a layout take up a narrow sliver of the entire page canvas (or side-scroll "infinitely" as if everyone had a 2048x1535 monitor like the foofy, brain-dead webmaster).

It's a shitty excuse for having 3 megabytes of markup and images to display 10K in text.

Yes, learning how to do it CORRECTLY takes a bit more time UP FRONT. But it saves effort down the road as your code is portable, maintainable, and can be rapidly and cleanly altered and appended without massive surgery and metric ass-tons of further prototyping.

Re:Notepad

[Gordonjcp]

the only way I know to do it now is to to re-edit every single one of those 100,000+ pages.

This is why you don't write your pages in straight HTML ;-)

That doesn't answer your question, though. So let's go through some possible ways of doing it.

The first, most obvious way is to edit a menu into every single page in the same place. You can do the same with the headers and footers too. That's a lot of copy-and-paste, though. Some editors will let you expand out a macro, so in your static text you'd put some suitably flagged thing like **MENU** that won't appear in real text. You then cook up the pages from tagged body text and upload them. This works, but is tedious. If you change one thing in a common block of text, then you have to recreate and upload the entire site every time. This is how Actinic E-Commerce used to work, I don't know if it still does. It sucks.

Okay, so how about some means of including the menu from a single file? Back in the day, we used to use Server-Side Includes. Rename your page to my_beachball_collection.shtml and stick a line like

<-- #include virtual="menu.html" -->

to insert the menu. This doesn't always work, especially if SSI isn't enabled. There's an excellent chance your host has PHP though, so instead you do this:

<?php require "menu.html"; ?>

Great! But before long you work out that actually it might be easier to just write the body text and have an index.php file that reads it in with a line like

<?php require $QUERY['page']; ?>

and a URL like http://mysite.me/index.php?page=my_beachball_collection - and this works perfectly. Until someone feeds it http://mysite.me/index.php?page=../../../etc/shadow and of course because your misconfigured server is running as root, it serves up your shadow password file.

Or, you could put the pages into a database, and then use a query like

printf("SELECT title, body FROM pages WHERE page='%s';", $QUERY['page']);

. Then you have URLs like the ones before, but you don't let people read files, you feed the content from a database. This works, except you're Sony so someone feeds it http://mysite.me/index.php?page='; UPDATE PAGES SET body="0wned"; and wipes out all your content since you didn't sanitise the database strings, or set up sane database permissions.

At which point, you give up and just install Drupal.

Re:Notepad

[monkeythug]

Biggest problem with sourceforge and has been for ages.

You'll do a search and find a project description that makes you go "Wow! That's exactly what I'm looking for!", then you get the disappointment a few seconds later of realising that writing the description is actually the entirety of the effort ever expended on the project.

Sourceforge really need to purge all these vapourware projects.

Dreamweaver

[sarku]

Adobe Dreamweaver. Been stable for 15 years or more.

Re:Dreamweaver

[PhantomHarlock]

I've been using dreamweaver for a long time now. It has not substantially changed and is good for editing run of the mill static web pages with a template.

Re:Dreamweaver

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Dreamweaver back since it was HomeSite.

All around a very good product that has so far lasted for the past decade.
It is more oriented towards the "I want to code, but see what I am doing" crowd, but it does so very well.

Aside from that, since you are obviously a Mac User, I would highly recommend looking into RapidWeaver, as it is very capable, surprisingly so for a drag-and-drop editing application, and you can post whatever you make on a server very easily as it is just HTML and Javascript.

If you need something a little more comprehensive with server-side scripting support and basic drag-and-drop forms, I would recommend considering a CMS application, such as ModX, Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla (in order of consideration).

Re:Dreamweaver

[tycoex]

Actually, I'd say that the difference between a professional craftsman and a hobbyist who builds stuff in his garage is often largely because the professional has a much larger assortment of tools to use.

Re:Dreamweaver

[rtb61]

So the real question is, what software can I use, so that I can pretend to be a web page designer without knowing all that messy stuff like html, css, xml and javascript/perl/php or even that weird server side stuff.

Answer, then reason all those graphical web page designer software falls over is basically because it is crap. People expect to be able to design web pages like all those professional on the web, rather than clunking amateurish single fixed page documents and are unhappy when they can't.

For people who want to learn there is of course notepad++ http://notepad-plus-plus.org/ and wampserver http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WampServer (if you really want to see how your web page will be served).

Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know im kind of a black sheep around here, but Expression Web & Visual Studio Web combined make a pretty solid base...

vim

[Firehed]

Or butterflies if you've got far more patience than I.

Recommendation

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Bluefish on Ubuntu. It's very functional and has enough longevity as far as I know.

Wrong tag

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to troll or something, but I think this should be tagged as "designer", not "developer".

Text editor of choice plus knowledge of HTML/CSS

[Anonymous Freak]

Notepad, TextEdit, TeX, emacs, vi, pico, whatever.

Never have to worry about the editor itself going obsolete because of emerging HTML standards, never have to worry about the tool itself disappearing.

Find yourself random web host of choice (I like nearlyfreespeech) that supports direct upload of files, no fiddly web interface forced on you, and voila! Instant future-proof website!

(Yes, I'm going to have to be weaned off iWeb+MobileMe for my personal domain, too. I'm a lazy bastard, and iWeb was too easy. Now I'll have to go back to hand-coding and/or at least find a simple-to-upload-to-from-iWeb host; which, now that I think about it, nearlyfreespeech should do.)

Content Management

[TimTucker]

If you look at the solutions for "editing" sites that scale, ultimately you'll find that what you're really looking for isn't a better visual editor, but rather a content management platform.

WordPress has a pretty decent track record for longevity, but there are plenty of other options out there as well.

Re:Content Management

[spinkham]

I would recommend a static site generator instead.

You get the benefits of a CMS without the server side software requirements, updates, and security problems.

I use nanoc and love it, but there's tons of other choices out there.

Re:Content Management

[nine-times]

This sounds right to me. Maybe you don't even need to administer the site, but use a hosted solution instead. That way, you can really focus on content creation.

But part of it is also having realistic expectations. It's very likely that in 10 years, the web will be a different beast, and the view of what constitutes a "good website" will change too. As the web changes, the tools used to create it must also change. Whatever you come up with, don't expect that you'll be using the same tools in 20 years. In computer terms, 5 years kind of is the "long haul".

Instead of trying to keep your tools constant, try to keep your data portable. One of the advantages of something like Wordpress is that it's so popular that, when it gets superseded by other things, there will certainly be methods to translate Wordpress into those new forms-- and it's generally easier to pull information from a database in a sensible way than to pull it out of HTML.

So what I'm saying is, don't focus on making sure that you can use the same editor for the next 20 years, and instead focus on trying to make sure you can pull your old content into a new form every 5 years. That's how you future-proof.

Re:Content Management

[Tridus]

Technically you can tell MS Word to output HTML, but what you get is really bad HTML.

That's the problem with most WSYWIG HTML editors. HTML doesn't lend itself well to WSYWIG editing and so what you always get is really bad HTML. If you want to do it well, you have to learn some HTML and use a good text editor.

If you don't mind shitty HTML then you have more options, but you're not going to find many people advocating them here.

Just learn HTML.

[Narcocide]

Seriously. You are looking for a solution to an impossible problem, and besides that it is *easier* to learn HTML than it is to learn Dreamweaver. Stop being frightened of the technicalities and just try it with a text editor for once.

Re:Just learn HTML.

[MouseR]

I actually built a complete e-comerce web site by hand something like 13 years ago. With php scripts (or was it Perl?) and some c-based CGIs. The reason I switched to WYSIWYG is because I don't have time to deal with that and that given web site development is a far cry from my regular Application programming duties, would rather spend whatever is left of my "free" time with my kids than learning to deal with CSS.

Utopia Framework

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, I had the same problem so I made the Utopia Framework. This is a simple tool which allows you to create website content directly. While not really ready wide adoption, I've been maintaining it (originally PHP, now Ruby) for over 10 years, and it's core ideas are (IMHO) very easy to understand and very powerful. The biggest issue right now is documentation.

Open Source CMS

[dhammond]

Surprised nobody has mentioned this yet, but there are many good open source CMS's that allow you to edit your website through browser based tools -- Drupal, Joomla, etc. My company has built our own CMS that allows wysiwyg editing of websites (which I won't plug). The point is, for the long haul and for a lot of reasons a browser-based solution is best. And no matter what happens to an open source project you can always continue to use the code and extend it for as long as you want.

RapidWeaver

[TimHunter]

Try RapidWeaver http://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/overview/. You'll probably want to use the Stacks http://yourhead.com/stacks/ plugin to get flexible page layouts and Collage http://yourhead.com/collage/ for photos.

I'm not connected to RealMac or YourHead, just a happy user.

Aptana Studio 3

[justfred]

As a PHP developer, I'm used to writing code manually rather than trying to use a GUI code creator.

Having been through several editors on several platforms, lately I like Aptana Studio 3 (version of Eclipse), mainly because of its FTP deployment, and the fact that it works identically on OSX and Windows.

(Biting tongue to avoid the troll response, Microsoft Word.)

MediaWiki

[davecotter]

I know the design can use some updating, and you don't have a lot of design freedom, but if your main goal is to just get information out there, update pages frequently, create new pages, and things of that nature, well i totally love MediaWiki. Your web editing tool is your web browser! I've been using it on my site since forever ( http://kjams.com/ ) and i have to say i'd never ever want to use anything else. yeah, maybe it's kindof ugly. but it's so *easy*!

Migrating from visual editing to hand coding.

[JoeytheSquid]

I've been a web designer since 1994. As all of my training was in the arts, not scripting or programming, I stumbled along making sites using visual editors until around 2001. At that point I realized that my various transitions from one visual editor to the next (Cyberstudio > Adobe GoLive > Dreamweaver) could be avoided if I did the proper thing and learned how to hand code HTML and CSS.

So I did. I throttled down my workload and taught myself how to hand code everything. Sure that first year was miserable but I've since put together a rapid development framework that allows me to turn a custom design to a working Wordpress theme in about a business day. The end result is less headaches, a more refined workflow and sites that actually validate.

Sure, I still rely upon an IDE for my development and most of the Mac IDEs are highly imperfect and rarely updated (Looking at you Coda, Textmate and Espresso), but at least my general workflow remains unchanged. Therefore should I need to drop Espresso and move to the (perpetually) forthcoming Coda 2, I'll be able to make that migration without much trouble.

Management of Adobe?

[Futurepower(R)]

That raises a bigger question: What has happened to the management of Adobe? There are many, many examples of bad management there, in my opinion. It seems that Adobe needs a new CEO.

There are new versions that don't fix old bugs and insufficiencies, but cost a lot. Sometimes when you buy a CD of Creative Suite, you get software on the CD that is many months old, and requires downloading the newest version.

Identifying OP's Target

[Rie Beam]

I'm a little confused -- are you looking for an online CMS? Or an offline tool for editing? Because that seems to be more than half of the recommendations coming up.

If you're looking for content management, your options are pretty much limited to how much power you ultimately want over your content. Drupal has a little bit of a learning curve but is easily the most flexible options in the pack; outside of that, try browsing a couple of distribution sites, or hell:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_systems

Of course, when it comes down to it, just simply learning to hand-code is not going to be the end of the world, I promise. Nothing has changed in the time you've described on the code-side of things except for bolted-on additions, and browsers are still pretty forgiving to older code (programmers could only wish for the kinds of backwards-compatibility HTML has had during its existence). HTML is not that difficult. CSS is not that difficult. AJAX might be a bit of a push, but JQuery is pretty solid for adding a little extra "zing" for not a lot of extra work. Look into it:

http://www.w3schools.com/

Re:Emacs

[Scarletdown]

I then transfer the mp3 to the machine and the script listens to it and Cello! creates the website exactly the way the customer describes it!

Fixed that for you. :p