Login for client to edit page

Liamario

I'm looking to create a login area for the client so they can edit text/ update pictures etc...

What's the easiest way to do this?

My current train of thought is like a log in to access editable regions etc...

Webmonkey

Does the site have a CMS, this would already have a login area.

If it's a static site, it will take more than just a login area. might have to move to a CMS.

Liamario

It's a static site. Is there an easier solution than setting up a CMS?

tricky D

You can use CushyCMS if they are not going to be adding pages or PageLime if they are. With Cushy you just add a class to wrap the editable content. Not sure about PageLime but I reckon it is similar. Perfect for a static site.

Liamario

I'll give that a try Tricky and update here with my progress

Liamario

May be important to note that,

1. this is the first site i'm doing for someone
2. I'm not getting paid to do it.
3. I've never implemented a CMS on a site before- so this is new to me

MOH

I'd second CushyCMS - it's really easy to get up an running with minimal changes to the existing site.

Liamario

I have decided on using cushy. With the other ones, a knowledge of php seems important and they appear to make it difficult for me to simply apply a CSS.

The only downside is having to leave the site in order to edit it. But I guess it does the job :-)

With all that said, I'm going to starting learning some of the other CMSs and Php as well.

Feathers

Liamario wrote: »

I have decided on using cushy. With the other ones, a knowledge of php seems important and they appear to make it difficult for me to simply apply a CSS.

The only downside is having to leave the site in order to edit it. But I guess it does the job :-)

With all that said, I'm going to starting learning some of the other CMSs and Php as well.

Wordpress might be a good one to go for next. You'll hear a lot of 'just a Wordpress site' comments, but it's now a pretty powerful CMS out of the box & most importantly, is intuitive for clients (etc) to use — so less time fielding questions once the site is handed over.

Plus, lots of hosting companies offer one button installation & even standard installation is a doddle. (All that said, still prefer Drupal in terms of PHP sites but much bigger learning curve!)

To get started, I'd take a look at a few themes & see the how they're put together. But once you're comfortable & want to create your own theme, I'd say start by creating flat HTML pages first & them fitting the dynamism into your templates, rather than trying to start from someone else's pre-existing template & trying to retrofit your design to their base HTML.

Liamario

Thanks for the advice feathers. I think my main problem with php is having a practical use for it; in terms of applying some php to site other than the contact page.
Is there somewhere I can go that can give me practical tutorials to implement on a site?

Feathers

Liamario wrote: »

Thanks for the advice feathers. I think my main problem with php is having a practical use for it; in terms of applying some php to site other than the contact page.
Is there somewhere I can go that can give me practical tutorials to implement on a site?

Well your biggest practical use will be in separating the content from the HTML. So rather than having a file for each page on your site, you instead create your pages to templates. So, looking at any medium - large website (Apple, Amazon, BBC, whatever) — you may have thousands of pages, but maybe as few as 5 – 10 templates: then different content is plugged in to them (& maybe different styles applied).

PHP allows you to be dynamic in certain mark-up (e.g. applying a class to a div based on the section of the site that it's in) & also allows you to connect to a database to populating your HTML pages with.

You can check out W3Schools pages on PHP & MySQL maybe to start off on this. But a CMS will look after the connection to the DB for you (once set up), & manage user log-ins, editors for content & all that. I would suggest that this might be an easier primer, as a lot gets abstracted away to begin with.

Maybe try getting Wordpress set up & check out there docs on theme development — http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development. Although I always find unpicking other people's code can be as informative as starting from scratch, so take a look at how they're putting together their default themes too.

Liamario

Funnily enough, I have W3schools saved as a book mark on their php tutorial.
I'd best get the thumb out!

pcbscott

I used this video tutorial guide to set up a basic CMS

http://www.developphp.com/view.php?tid=323&t=Part_1_How_to_Build_PHP_and_MySQL_Custom_CMS_Website_Software

The result is very basic but it works and for me was a great introduction to some of the things you can do with PHP, pretty easy once you have done this to develop further upon it in to something usefull.

Squeeonline

IMO WP is the way to go.

It will be supported for years to come, easy upgrade system which will help keep the site secure, vast array of free themes and plugins to extend the site.

It's very easy to learn and they have a "5 minute install" which will probably take 30 mins the first time :-)