Stephen,
> I support the approach but find problems with implementation (even on
> paper). All is well until templates get modified - which is inevitable.
I agree, it is inevitable so don't fight it, go with it and pinch some of
the good ideas that your authors come up with.
>
> Within the context of the WWW, how do we ensure that templates can be
> distributed without them being altered en-route/ in use?
I'm looking initially at two models to help with our in house production
(rather than for academic departments). The first is an off the shelf
package, NetObjects Authoring Server. This lets you lock down elements of a
page and assign different members of staff different tasks/permissions. The
second approach is to build simple database backed publishing solutions.
Most of these are very small scale, the biggest only having about 500 pages.
Here you provide you content contributors with a set of web forms to drop in
their data. This data is then displayed through your corporate template.
Both of these methods should allow those with appropriate expertise to do
the job that they know easily without moving off into unfamiliar territory.
You graphic designer can produce the graphics, your HTML jockey writes a few
templates and the rest of your staff can get on with what they know
best...the content.
The added advantages of the database approach are that you can reuse the web
content in paper publications and if you are running everything through a
browser, your software and support costs are reduced.
Most of the pages I've built have been constructed using ASP/PWS/Access but
we are looking at ASP/NT/IIS/SQL and ChilliASP/UNIX/Apache/Oracle (we have
Oracle on the main system) as big brother alternatives. Other solutions are
PHP, Cold Fusion and on to the big application servers.
I'm not holding database backed publishing up as a universal panacea but
they do seem to have speeded up and improved our publishing efforts. (Well,
I no longer have to mark up the internal pages, I just build a template and
a quick back end database).
Alex
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