I need a method for customer to edit HTML text

[mlegg]

I am about to do a church website and the priest wants a way to have a page with his comments, new, etc. I can't get him login to the control panel of the site because we have 100 other sites running and don't want him to mess up anything. I looked into cms and it seems to be what I think I am looking for, I am just not sure what is the best way to go about this.

http://www.1and1.com/ is the company we are using for hosting of this site.

[djr33]

What kind of account do you have with 1and1? What serverside languages do you have available? This is not an HTML question (even though HTML is the result). It's PHP, or ASP, or whatever happens to be the language you end up using (there are a bunch, but PHP is my default assumption).

If you Google "compare CMS" you'll get some websites that let you do side-by-side comparisons of requirements and features, and you'll find what you need. There are lots of options. To name a couple to consider, Joomla and Wordpress, depending on what you need.

The more complicated the CMS, the more work it will be to set up (and in theory a potential security risk, although well-maintained software should be generally safe). But then you also get more features.

Do you want them to edit HTML code directly? Do you want WYSIWYG? That's a choice for most systems, actually, but check on the WYSIWYG controls if they aren't capable of editing HTML directly to be sure they're sufficient.

Generally speaking, the more limited it is, the easier your job will be, so pick whatever matches (only) your minimum requirements (and whatever expansions you might do in the future).

Have you seen BeverleyH's Fast Edit?
http://fast-edit.co.uk/

That might just be the perfect solution for you (assuming it's compatible with your server-- PHP), and that you don't need to allow especially complicated functions. There are two versions, one that allows just editing existing content, and another that allows more things like managing (adding/deleting) pages.

You could also learn PHP (etc.) and make one yourself, but that's probably not needed. I've done it, but it's only worth it if you need very specific customization (or integration with something else).


Note also that you'll need somewhere to store the information-- in text/"flat" files? (that can get messy), or in a database? (MySQL? Access? something else?)