The current crop of browser based WYSIWYG editors are far from cross browser and standards compliant, so steer clear.
You could consider looking into Macromedia Contribute, which is perfect for little client touch-ups in a WYSIWYG, non-technical environment.
If you want your own CMS, and want standards, and templating, and the 400 other things that are on your list, you need to consider writing your own solution.
However, I will also point you to a couple of existing solutions which may either inspire you, or prove to be "enough of a solution" for your situation...
1. MovableType (MT) [1] is behind 90% of the blogs out there, and since blogs are behind over 90% of all standards based websites right now, it's at least *conducive* to a standards-based workflow. It's *supposed* to be blogging software, but it's being bent to handle all sorts of website content... Doug Bowman [2] uses it to power his blog, his portfolio, and used it as the CMS for adaptive path's [3] entire site (give or take a few bits) -- he has an excellent explanation of it all too [4].
The cool thing about MT is that there's truckloads of plug-ins, which provide real power. A plug-in I recently read about by John Gruber [5] is Markdown [6], a way to convert email-style plain text into valid XHTML. See the link for more details. John also wrote Smartypants, which makes HTML "better".
However, I'm getting a little OT, since MT is Perl Based, but there's a huge community, and you might be able to bend MT to suit your needs.
2. Textile [7] is like Markdown, in that it parses email-style raw text with simple formatting (*bold*) and shorthand to produce valid XHTML... it's written in PHP, and has been embedded into Textpattern [8], a wonderful new PHP-driven CMS which is in Gamma testing at the moment. Textpattern fully supports and *embraces* standards, XHTML, CSS, et al, and is quite possible the best --and most elegant-- CMS on the market. Whilst it hasn't got everything *I'd* want in a CMS (hence why I'm building my own), it's truly amazing.
It *can* be used for blogs, and has many blog-like features, but Textpattern can be used for all sorts of web publishing.
However, it takes over your whole site.. it's all inclusive -- CMS, Users & Admin, CSS, Templating, XHTML, etc... EVERYTHING!
At the very least, Textile might inspire you to write something like it or Markdown, empowering your clients to make small and large changes using nothing but a plain text area and a few simple special characters to change formatting slightly.
The links:
1. http://www.movabletype.org/ 2. http://www.stopdesign.com/ 3. http://www.adaptivepath.com/ 4. http://www.stopdesign.com/log/2003/07/11/adaptive_paths_mt_setup.html 5. http://daringfireball.net/ 6. http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ 7. http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/ 8. http://www.textpattern.com/
On Sunday, March 21, 2004, at 10:01 AM, Adam Reiswig wrote:
Is there a good open source php based cms system out there that can do the above? I'd sure like to know about it. Thanks for any pointers!
--- Justin French http://indent.com.au
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