XWD and CMS

[remi]

The big drawback of WYSIWYG HTML editors like XWD is, that they don't offer content management functions, like the CMS or blog systems are doing. This is problematic, whenever you have a website with a lot of pages and would like to change your layout some months later. With a WYSIWYG editor, you have to start from the beginning in this case.

CMS and blog systems are more intelligent: They are separating the content and the layout, so that you can insert thousands of pages full of content, but you need just one click to change your layout for all this pages.

Most of the CMS and blog systems are also able to import your content from another CMS or blog system, so that you're able to migrate from one system to another. This is often not possible with WYSIWYG editors.

CMS systems offers also the possibility to let your customers edit their content by themself without the danger that they are destroying your well thought out design. In the case of Xara Web Designer another problem is, that the FTP publishing routine is transferring all pages again and again, whenever you change just a simple word in just one of your 100 pages.

Not so, with a CMS system. You'll find more a division of responsibilities with CMS systems:

• The design of a CMS or blog system is created from a Webdesigner and often added with some JavaScript functions/widgets and/or Flash from the Webdesigner himself or a Webdeveloper.
  Using different designs for CMS or blog systems is very easy. For example, if you use Wordpress as a blog system (or a simple CMS), you can choose of thousands of available templates from a very big community and also commercial vendors. The same with most of the CMS systems.
  Creating your own template is also easy for a skilled Webdesigner. There are a lot of tutorials available, which are teaching you how to create a new template or customize a given template.
  
• The endusers are creating new pages with new content (including different content types like text, tables, images, videos, ...). And such systems are offering integrated WYSIWYG editors, of course, so that the enduser is able to see what he get. The endusers are often called "editors" in such environments.
  
• Often there is also an Administrator for the CMS or blog system.

I would recommend a WYSIWYG HTML editor for small websites (5-10 pages) and a CMS or blog system for medium to big websites.

Remi

[slavelle]

Remi,

I agree with a lot of what you've written, but not this part:

Creating your own template is also easy for a skilled Webdesigner. There are a lot of tutorials available, which are teaching you how to create a new template or customize a given template.

I've done a good bit of css/html coding and I've changed up some Joomla! sites, and the "from scratch" is a LOT easier than chaning out CMS design stuff. I usually start from a template and modify until it looks mostly different, but it can take a while to identify ALL of the elements in what is usually a pretty extensive CSS sheet and php code that is complex enough that if you aren't at least moderately familiar with either php or some language constructs, it will be really hard to figure out which bits of code make which things appear on the screen and which CSS rules are being used to style it.

Also, if you design a site in a CMS and then change out the theme and that new theme doesn't have the same widgets and things, you still have a bit of work to do to retool the content to flow into the areas THAT template presents.

[covoxer]

Creating your own template is also easy for a skilled Webdesigner.

Creating your own blog script to be used with WD design is even easier for a skilled PHP programmer.

[remi]

@slavelle: How much work and also knowledge is necessary, in order to create a new template, depends more on the used CMS. Typo 3 offers with "Templa Voila" a good mechanism to map parts of your template to the right content elements - graphically with a template editor and very flexible. Therefore I see no big problems with such a task.

@covoxer: Why should a developer reinvent the wheel? Modern CMS and blog systems offers so much functions, you have to reprogramme otherwise (including a WYSIWYG editor, tag clouds, permalinks, multiple (also nested) categories to articles, multiple authors with login mechanism, filters & search for blog articles, trackback and pingback mechanism, and a whole plugin architecture with hundreds of other modules). I mean, if you have so much free time on your hands, then feel free to do it, of course.

Remi

[covoxer]

Why should a developer reinvent the wheel?

I see you are still confused here. The correct question is: "Why would a skilled web designer create this thread?".

[remi]

Hmm, I see you are trying to be funny as usual, John. The correct question is: "Is there a CMS (dynamic Content Management Solution) for XWD that anyone has experience of that integrates into XWD?" (see post #1)

[covoxer]

Hmm, I see you are trying to be funny as usual, John. The correct question is: "Is there a CMS (dynamic Content Management Solution) for XWD that anyone has experience of that integrates into XWD?" (see post #1)

Exactly. The question is not about advantages or disadvantages of any of the web development methods. So your essay is OT and you have to be punished for this.

[remi]

Oh my.

[syntagm]

My thanks to all who contributed. A few lessons from this: (a) Revisit and read the XARA homepage. There are some good readymade solutions in the module store for a variety of needs. (b) use the search site option (which I did not at first) it gave me all the answers. (c) I tried out site updater (could not find the tial option so I bought a months subscription). It works but is rather basic. Would help if you could create passwords for clients independently. (d) Read the replies to your original query - they can be quite funny but mostly helpful.