NYCPHP Meetup

[Marc Antony Vose]

Hi there:

Just replying to this since Tim said he was interested in what method I chose.

About my situation:  I am an independent developer whose clients are 
small business whose character or integrity I like, or non profits 
and documentary filmmakers.

Basically, this means people who have no money.  :)  Therefore, my 
decisions are generally made given that I have smaller budgets and 
fewer people (read: me) at my disposal.

So, after looking into all this stuff, I decided to take htmlArea and 
slap it in as an optional feature of my custom-built CMS, which I 
have been developing for years.

For me, design is the number one concern, so a pre-built CMS is 
really not an option.  Generally, their layout and design is 
structured around a fairly narrow set of potential uses; plus, you 
have to struggle against other people's code when you want to 
customize.  So, back in 1998, I chose to build my own system from the 
ground up.  It is great in some ways, and sorely lacking in others, 
but at least I know what every single line of code does without even 
thinking about it.

Part of the system is a form generation class, and an admin tool 
framework, which I reuse on projects, so I was concerned that merging 
something like this would cause me to have to make wholesale changes. 
However, I am, like, really pleasantly surprised to find that this 
htmlArea JavaScript component is able to be merged into my CMS, 
without disturbing one line of my code!  This makes me happy.  And 
the JS code is very well-written and amenable to customization.

Thanks to Mitch and Brent, for getting me on this track, and thanks 
for the heads-up about OpenOffice, too.  I really wish there were a 
common Word processor document standard based around XML so that 
files could easily be directly parsed.  That would be my preferred 
solution for this kind of thing, in the long run, but right now it's 
too much work, and Open Office isn't exactly idiot-proof yet on OS X 
(still running in X11).  Maybe we're a few years away from this being 
a viable option.

Cheers,


Marc Antony Vose
http://www.suzerain.com/

What can be shown cannot be said.
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein



>Marc Antony Vose writes:
>
>>  Right now, believe it or not, I am leaning toward diving into
>>  REALbasic and coding my own cross-platform Windows/OS X XML document
>>  editor to sell to clients who make these kinds of requests, for them
>>  to prepare their Web-based documents in, rather than dealing with all
>>  the vagaries of going from Word to ASCII or Unicode-compatible
>>  textual content dynamically.
>>
>
>I would suggest reading:
>Thinking XML: The open office file format
>http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think15/
>
>There are some resource links in that article
>that also might prove to be useful.
>
>I would be interested in hearing
>what you decide on.
>
>HTH
>
>T. Gales & Associates