Why not use a wysiwyg edit box? There are quite a few of them... unless you don't want to restrict your users too much.

http://www.labs4.com/htmleditbox/2.0/demo.php

Mark wrote, On 2003/Jul/30 11:11 AM:
But isn't this just defining your own version of something like
bbcode? And wouldn't you be better off using bbcode in that case,
when there are plenty of classes for parsing it already out there?

You could even edit the parsers to limit the set of tags available to
your users.


--- bill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


I'd recommend starting simple.

Paragraph breaks are two carriage returns (Enter, Enter).  Give the
writers some
ability to do bold, italic, etc. by using something that isn't html
(I don't
store html tags in text fields).  For example +b+would make this
bold-b-, or
+i+would make this italic-i-.  You can also have +c+ to center -c-
and could do
the same thing with +16+sizes-16- and +red+colors-red-

Then, when displaying the text, translate what they have into html.
+b+ becomes
<b> and -b- becomes </b>.  +c+ become <div align="center"> and -c-
become
</div>, etc.

Images are a bit different.  I let them specify the content and
order of images
(uploaded with the content), but I have the script align them where
appropriate
(count the number of paragraphs, insert the images in between
appropriately,
alternating sides [right, left, right, etc.]).

I find these simple things work for two reasons.  First, authors
are used to
editors doing things with their text; think of a magazine or
newspaper editing,
cutting, putting in pictures, etc.  Second, authors don't want to
learn html any
more than they want to learn page layout programs.  Give them some
basic
formatting stuff and add more as needed.

kind regards,

bill

Justin French wrote:


Hi all,

I've been writing CMS's for years now, and at the moment, I find

myself


looking for some breakthrough, or at the very least, a change in

the


way I do things.

Anyone can write a CMS to manage simple articles with a data

structure


like:

id
author
date_written
heading
body
keywords
description
publish_date
expires_date

But, it still requires the writer to know a little mark-up
(p,b,h1,h2,i,a,img,etc) in order to create an article with

multiple


paragraphs, sections, headings, images, etc, with well

structured,


valid mark-up.

So, I've started thinking about how this can be tackled.

Idea #1 was to have an unlimited number of 'blocks' or 'objects'
*related* to an article, resulting in two tables:

ARTICLE
id, author, date, title, keywords, desc, etc

BLOCKS
id, articleid, heading, content, order, etc

But the reality is that different types of pages will require

different


types of blocks (some with headings, some with images, some with
captions, etc).  On the surface, this seems either too big to

tackle,


or too complex to expect the writer/contributor to grasp.

I'd be really interested in hearing how any one else is tackling

this


stuff, even if it is only remotely related to PHP.

Justin


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===== Mark Weinstock [EMAIL PROTECTED] *************************************** You can't demand something as a "right" unless you are willing to fight to death to defend everyone else's right to the same thing. ***************************************

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