How to create a simple dynamic web page that your client can update / amend.

[Boy]

Nice tool to have in the toolbox, Egg. Thanks!

[wizard509]

Brilliant solution Egg. I downloaded the video just in case, although I don't even pretend to know anything about web site creation. I keep thinking maybe one of these days I'll look into it.

[ashtangakasha]

Great idea, Egg. Thanks for the tip. I've been using and recommending Drive (and formerly Docs) for quite a while, but I never got around to exploring "publish to the web". This does seem to be an excellent minimalist CMS solution for my situation.

Cheers,

Allen

[Egg Bramhill]

Cheers everybody. I've been using Drive for a couple of years now to supply spreadsheets to a couple of sites but have been stumped when trying to use it for simple text input. I'd tried Documents to do this but the delivery was to much like a word processor interface. I'd never tried the Presentation interface previously but I found it worked excellently.

Also on mobile type delivery platforms I found a lot of the tiny menu items unacessable but found these could be covered up with rectangles covering these features.

[derwalkerhaus]

This was great! Thanks so much for the post!!!

[slavelle]

Egg - I appreciate what you are doing here.

That said, I'm a big Joomla fan and quite adept at creating "templates" from the Xara designs we build. We create the static design and layout in Xara and then I create a template in Joomla using CSS and the T3 Framework.

It's a big ;earning curve for the developer, but once you get it in place, it's not a big learning curve for the end-user. In some cases, we can limit the ability for the user to update the site to them just being able to update a single article/page or whatever, though nearly in every case, they want to update all sorts of things.

The problem is that Xara just isn't very good at dealing with dynamic content, so there is always a tradeoff in design, layout, mobile responsiveness, and other things that a CMS just handles much more gracefully. I know this isn't for everyone because there IS such a development learning curve, but in the end, it serves our client better in almost every instance. We just end up spending more time and effort trying to get Xara to do these sorts of things and when we are done, it's more trouble to update, it's not really THAT much easier for the user, and it is usually less than what they wanted so we end up trying to bolt more and more thingsonto it and it gets harder to maintain than it would have been if we just had done it with Joomla to begin with.

[richinri]

Seems like a great idea but damn if I can get it to work. One question is will ANYONE be able to edit? Second, what are the settings to get it to show up? My iframe keeps saying the document can't be viewed when I try to view the page in Xara. Yes I published it. Yes I said let everyone on the net view it.

[Egg Bramhill]

@ Slavelle,

I use Joomla a lot, creating the look in Xara then use Artisteer to create the cms template. From the outset my intention was to create a simple editable iframe that users of Xara could easily use from within Xara whithout, in your words "a big learning curve for the developer". So my solution is aimed at those Xara users who don't want that learning curve / don't want the additional hosting costs of needing a mySQL Database.

Clients are strange beings, yes they always want dynamic pages at the outset but in reallity I find that half of them don't use it once it's set up, often due to time restaints/staff workload. I know it's quite easy to edit from the Front End but I find most clients don't do it this way. They create a document in Word, Copy & Paste it into the Front End / Publish and are horrified it's not as it is in Word. Joomla doesn't handle Word content very well. Further to this Joomla's text editors are not very WYSIWYG. I use JCE and I regularly have to go back and tweak the contents in the editor several times to get it to look as required.

So I reiterate, my suggestion is for those users who don't want the hassle of learning cms software. It has it's drawbacks in as much as the iframes page length must be fixed and therefore content has to be of a similar size than the one being edited. If the Google Drive content is kept to a maximum 460 pixels wide, it is quite simple to lay out in both Main & Mobile variants in Xara.

[Egg Bramhill]

@ richinri,

No, you can set who can edit it to just yourself (or just your client provided you have inititial access to their Google Drive when designing) OR anyone who has the link to that section of the Google Drive OR you can make it public so anyone can.

Your Second point I can't say without looking at your Xara page.

I'll make a step by step video in the next few days so people can follow the process.

[richinri]

Thank you Egg. I hate to put you through that since you did a video. I can get anything else to show up in the iframe but my test google doc which tells me I am not doing something right on that end. I am trying to make this work while doing a redesign for a long term client who is always asking for an editable area and then doesn't use it. This will be the third time I set one up (first in Xara) which he will end up NOT using.