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Easily maintained and Updated Web Site!!

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by ddhalsey

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I am attempting to develop a portal for my company. This site will be a performance management web site that will provide online resources to all of our company associates to view, read and learn about this topic and how we use it throughout this company. It will need to be easily maintained by a non-technical manager who will also update the site. I was thinking of using Java Beans to read some XML pre-defined tags and display that information with JSPs. Therefore, the manager will only need to type the information she want to be displayed between the XML tags. This may not be the best approach. Do you know of any other way to do this? The method will have to be very simplistic so the manager can keep the site updated with links and information.

Thanks

14 replies

by tjc

Non-Technical? They would have to lean and use the jsp and xml and such - it would be easier for them to just use word for windows and then save as an HTML file. This way it would be easier for the manager since all they need to know is word.

by ddhalsey

There is not time to teach these people Java. However, using XML they will be able to just write plain text between the tags and those tags will be read by the beans. This is the only approach I am familiar with. If you know of another way, usinga different technology, please let me know.

by amanabala

From what I understood from your post, you would like to create this portal with dynamic content, that may be changing over a period of time but the intrinsic functionality does not change.

If that is the case, there is a simple solution: Createa place-holder (only admins or managers can access this) where the user types the content and "instructs" the application to display it on certain page at certain location. This instruction can then be persisted and executed when the regular users visit the site. This would mean that the pages in the portal need to contain smaller portlets that can be customized.

Hope this helps. if you need more information, please feel free to contact me.

Good luck!
Ravi

by ddhalsey

Are you suggesting that I use Java Portlets? I am trying to steer away from Java with this crowd-if it is possible. There is not time to teach these people Java. However, using XML they will be able to just write plain text between the tags and those tags will be read by the beans. This is the only approach I am familiar with. If you know of another way, using a different technology, please let me know.

by amanabala

I am not suggesting using Java Portlets. I am suggesting using a modular approach to your web pages. The way I look at "portals" is that the development should result in an infrastructure where data or content is displayed. A content administrator (with little or no knowledge of the tools that were used to build the portal) should have a place to upload/replace/enhance the content. I can create and send a more detailed document on this. If you are interested, please let me know.

Thanks
Ravi

by jpennin

Another option is to setup a content management system. If there is only one user entering information in for the web this is probably over kill. My company is doing this to allow a large number of users to enter information while only needing basicword processing skills. We setup templates to define how pages should generally look, and the employees enter the data to the page.

by tony derosa

Rather than having the user deal with tags of any sort, why don't you create a program or script that can generate the page from a template using the updated text that the user saves in a text file from any word processor.

If not very lengthy, you could provide a web page form that captures the text area and use it to generate the page. The text could be stored in a dbase and accessed dynamically and archived if desired.

by tony derosa

Also, in a web page form, other relevant data could be captured, like category, author, headline etc...

by jay eckles

If you're not willing to invest in a real content management system (Teamsite is just one example) and you don't have the ability (resources, skills, time) to develop one yourself, then I would look at one of the systems being developed on Sourceforge. They might require some completion or customization on your part, but it would be a lot better than starting from scratch.

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