I created a website and constantly updating it myself if any users need any information on it updated. My question is, is there a software I can use so if a user needs to update something on the website they can do it themselves? I am not talking about having Front Page in every users machine. For example, the file default.asp will have new information, they will just create a word document and default.asp will load or pull whatever is in the Word Document they created and will display it without sacrificing the layout of the website.

Maybe this can be done programatically in ASP? If there is anyone who can guide me on how to go about it please give me assistance.

Thanks,
Judy

Are you planning on having the users be able to upload the data file(s)? What would be the user's access to the web site files?

Does it make sense to build a content management system for this site? You could put all the changable content into a database and then build a management interface.

You could have the content live in XML/text files (NOT Word), and read those in your pages for the content. The users could then update the XML/text files.

Peter
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Work smarter, not harder.

Hi Peter,

That is exactly the answer I was looking for. I was thinking of a database where they can update it with their word document or like you said a text file. Building a content management system is where I will be needing help with. How to go about building it is new to me. I was hoping somebody can point me to a sample code, demo or a software that I can use to build the content management system.

Thanks,
Judy

Well, there are oodles of content management systems (CMS) out there. I think the hardest part is that they have to be very customizable. I have build several from scratch to suit my needs. If you aren't familiar with writing database interaction code then I'd suggest getting a book or looking for some online demos/tutorials for talking to a database with ASP.

Writing a CMS of any kind for a web application opens up a whole can of worms with regards to user access (security, who can access what). It's no trivial task. There a lot of factors to consider that will affect your design:
- Can your web application support databases? Most any IIS based application would be able to support MS-Access. If you have a SQL server available, much better.
- Is your application an inTRAnet or an inTERnet application?
- Is there FTP access to the site? Although building a CMS is good, if there's FTP access, that could greatly simplify things and provide simple security.

Peter
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Work smarter, not harder.

I am familiar with coding in ASP interacting with MS ACESS. This is actually what I wrote our website with. We have an internet application which one sections requires a user to login to their account and check balances and does calculations which required me to use a database. The rest are just html/text codes which I am planning to modify using a CMS or a program I will write.

I am currently experimenting on just one page of the website and it looks good. The page has 5 paragraphs and I keyed in the text in a field called DefaultParagraph, after typing in the second paragraph I had to put html code <P> so it would show a space between the 1st and the 2nd paragraph. I am concerned that the users might omit this in typing their text. Is there anyway I can show the separation of paragraphs without assigning a different field to each paragraph?

In regards to FTP. I can set it up so they can just FTP the changes. In setting up the FTP, do you just go to your IIS and start the FTP service and you will be able to have FTP Access.

Sorry, I have so many questions. I hope you can guide me with this project.

Thanks,
Judy

I was suggesting FTP as a possible alternative. It sounds like you are well on your way. Stick with a web based system, it'll be much less prone to errors once you have it working.

As far are your paragraph problem...

Let's say the user enters something like this:
"Here is some text for the first paragraph

Here is the second paragraph."

The database will store it like that, and when you write it to HTML it will end up like that, but the browser will ignore the hard returns. So just do a simple replacement to change the hard returns into an HTML break when you write it out...

Response.Write Replace(objRecordSet("contentField"), vbcrlf, "<br>")

Then you'll get:
"Here is some text for the first paragraph<br><br>Here is the second paragraph."

Peter
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Work smarter, not harder.

Hi Peter,

The Response.write replace code worked good. Thanks for the tip and your patience. I will stick with a web based system like you suggested.

Thanks,
Judy