Review: Page Publisher

Page Publisher
http://www.wilsonweb.com/afd/pagepublisher.htm
interactivetools.com, inc.
#850 - 609 West Hastings St.
Vancouver, BC, Canada V6B 4W4
$99

Is there someone in your organization who doesn't have the technical savvy keep his or her section of the website up-to-date? I've found a great tool I recently installed on my church's website that makes updates easy for the rank novice. Page Publisher is a CGI program written in Perl for Windows or Unix servers.

Code on Webpages

The webmaster can set up one, dozens, or hundreds of webpages with special tags that indicate the paragraphs or areas that can be updated. Each changeable area is marked with tags something like this:

<!--publish type="textbox" name="Managers_Memo"--> Changeable content goes here.
<!--/publish-->

A single webpage could have one or dozens of such tags to allow updating of monthly comments, schedules, contact persons, etc.

Webmaster Web Interface

Each webpage with publish tags is then identified in the webmaster's interface, listing:

• Webpage Name
• Webpage Filepath (the precise path on the webserver to this particular webpage)
• Webpage URL

This tells the program exactly where the webpage is so that changes can be made in real-time. I've set up six different webpages on the church's website that can be changed remotely by the church staff.

Client Web Interface

The client web interface is much simpler than the webmaster's so the client can't do any damage. Depending upon his or her skill, the client can be allowed or prevented from (1) adding pages, (2) editing at the HTML level rather than just text, and (3) removing pages. For each webpage, the client uses the web interface to view old content and make whatever changes are appropriate. The changeable content appears within a text area box in the client's interface and is quite accessible, even to those not familiar with the ins and outs of website maintenance.

No longer can the boss blame the webmaster for being slow to make updates. Now she can make them herself with just a username and password to gain access. If you have several departments, each will need a separate Page Publisher license, unless you want to give one department access to another department's webpages.

The webpages produced are static, search engine indexable HTML pages, not dynamic pages, created-on-the-fly. Once changes have been made in a webpage via the client web interface, the actual HTML of the page is changed, so if the webmaster uploads the old page over the current one, the boss's careful changes will be wiped out -- and she will be mad.

The program is well-designed, straightforward, easy-to-install in the webserver's cgi-bin directory, easy-to-use, and priced well for small businesses -- or as an add-on for web designer clients. Recommended.

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