On 17 Dec 2002, at 17:15, Michael McKee wrote:

> On Tuesday, December 17, 2002, at 02:17  PM, David Jones
> wrote:
> 
> >>
> >> There are a lot of PHP books these days, and I haven't
> >> read the latest... that caveat apart, one I do have and
> >> can recommend is Professional PHP Programming from
> >> Wrox.
> >
> > Thanks. I looked at a bunch of PHP books a few days ago,
> > that was one of them.
> 
> There are two with very similar names. The newer one
> "Professional PHP4" with 11 faces on the cover is a bit
> better. Another one I like is "PHP and MySQL Web
> Development" by Welling and Thompson is good too.

I looked at both of those (the older and newer Wrox 
books, our Borders here had them both) and the 
Welling & Thompson book. There were things I liked 
about both of them, but still not sure ... Yeah, I have 
problems making decisions! ;-)

> I used PostNuke for a year on two non-profit sites. One
> got turned back in to a regular HTML site when I gave the
> job over to another volunteer. The other I switched to
> Moveable Type, [http://movabletype.org] a Perl/MySQL
> publishing system. It's not as feature rich but adequate
> and very easy to use. It offers bookmarklettes that allow
> cut and past publishing in less than a minute. I maintain
> my own blog on MT and am very happy with it.
> 
> My impression was that it was difficult to teach people to
> use PostNuke and I am a professional trainer. The
> interface is just too intimidating. The system worked well
> for me though. The number of add ons and skins is amazing.

That's true! I'd prefer to stick with Postnuke, our hosting 
service already has it installed.

My impression from the Postnuke web site was that 
the "interface" for updating was part of what you 
customized? Anyway, I've hardly begun to look at 
Postnuke.

FWIW, in my life here, I'm a trainer.

> If you don't need the database and search features you
> might look into Macromedia's new program, Contribute. It
> makes it drop dead simple for non-technical people to
> update sites. Drag and drop from Word into the page, click
> a button and it does all the ftp for you, putting the
> linked files in the proper directories. You can set
> templates up so nobody can alter the non-changing elements
> and it even maintains old versions to roll back to if the
> new page sucks. At $100 US it's very reasonably priced,
> too. I don't know if Macromedia gives non-profit discounts
> on it like they do Dreamweaver.

My understanding re Contribute is that (1) it's a per-
seat license, and (2) it's tied to Windows. I don't use 
Windows, nor do a couple other folk who'd be updating 
web content. Plus, I'd prefer something purely web-
based, so people can update content without having to 
have special software installed on whatever computer 
they happen to be using. (Like I said, I don't use 
Windows, and I have three different computers ... ;-)

David
dvjones(at)ksbe.edu
 

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