Blog authoring in Contribute or access to content stored in a database?
Deeje has a posting of results of a survey Macromedia did with regards to blog postings. I think it is a very useful exercise but I hope that the Contribute team is not going to focus so much on a tool for blogs but instead a tool to access and edit content in a database.
The article I wrote a while back on a simple PHP script that can convert db content to static html and back again is just a hint of a larger application we built in CPA that actually drops content into a DW template and peels it out again for DB publication. There were some challenges with this once you go past straight text. For example:
- Inserting images, do they go into the database? how do we link to them in articles?
- Links to other files that are either elsewhere or soon-to-be on the server – how to manage those?
- draft tracking was just adding another stage to the PHP but it would be nice is the ‘publish’ button meant ‘to the database’ and the draft was managed not as a static file but within the db.
- how can we work with Contribute Publishing Services in this environment?
I use Textpattern to manage this blog. Sure it means typing in a box but thanks to Safari and a little bit of textile knowledge (that Drew has proclaimed serious commitment too) it is really easy. I have draft tracking, user management, file management (haven’t used it yet), plug-ins, and other features I have no idea what they do as yet.
Problem is that it doesn’t connect to my other sites and that is where the whole Web Publishing System can come in. The Macromedia folks are on to something, just hope they don’t focus a feature to be useful for only blogs but look at dynamic content as a whole instead.