Question

I have a quick question. We are building a site for a shop that has 12 different locations. So there is a Portal page, and then the 12 locations pages.

The design is the same for each location, just different text and rotator images. What I did before for another site was just used PHP and a Database, and had a site.php?shop=city&page=about and just did some rewrites so it would be /city/about/ which works good.

That way when I need to make an overall design change, it will apply to all locations instead of duplicating the site 12 times and if I catch one thing, I need to do it on all 12 sites.

One thing that we don’t like about that is if someone in the team needs to make a change to the text, they would need to go in the MySQL Database to make the content changes which they are unfamiliar with. I could create a basic CMS but I would like some suggestions on what else I can do to make this easy on everyone.

If I need to create one of the sites and duplicate it 11 times, I could do that but was just seeing if there were any easier ways you guys know of, where it would still be easy for people to update the content with FTP.

Thanks!

Answer 1

From my point of view you have a few options:

1. Build a basic update form with a basic WYSIWYG editor, more or less a very basic CMS
2. Use an include file structure then the user only needs to edit a text file for example for changes to reflect on the site, note they may need to know basic HTML and FTP is likely to be required
3. Give access to phpMyAdmin, again note they may need to know a little HTML (edit: as already suggested I just noticed, sorry need to load answers while I’m typing)
4. Install an out of the box CMS in the ‘locations’ or ‘stores’ directory and only have it used on these pages

Personally I would just build a simple CMS in this case… then again I have built around 15 CMS’ in the past so it only takes me about an hour to code something like this.

Hope that helps you.