* XemiComputers Web Update Builder
Simple content management is an oxymoron but one of the simplest I’ve found is a product called Web Update Builder from XemiComputers (see links below).
WUB allows you to create custom client content editor programs that can only modify specially tagged content on Web pages using FTP to update the Web server content.
Content is tagged using special tags:
To prepare the Web pages to be edited you need to add the
The client program can also be branded by incorporating your own logo in its display.
Once the editable files have been scanned and the tags validated you need to upload the list of Web pages to the server. A list is created in the first directory that contains pages that can be edited. When the client program connects to the server it knows where to find the list and can then determine which files are editable and where they are.
This is clever because it allows the list of files to be updated without modifying the client program (that said, I suspect that it would be easy to create multiple list files in different directories and wind up with clients getting the wrong file lists – perhaps the list should always be in the root?).
You can create multiple versions of the client software so that each user can have a different list of files to edit. The client software connects to the Web site on initialization and downloads the list of editable files. The user selects a file, it is downloaded, and the editable fields are displayed. Once changes are made the file is FTP’ed back to the site.
The client only allows you to create plain, italic and bold text and optionally URLs depending on the parameters set in the
The system works well but I’d like to see the client software made more user friendly – currently it is more “techie” than it needs to be. I’d also like to see the addition of font color control (you can currently only have colored fonts by wrapping the
Nit picking apart the software runs on Windows and costs $149 for unlimited users.
