An easy-to-change video embed?

April 14, 2008 11:48 AM

Designed a web site for a guy. Short of going whole-hog blog, is there an easy way I can make it so he can log in and change one little YouTube embed (or other bit of HTML) at his convenience?

What I mean is, without setting up a blog-style diary or any kind of chronological format...whether there's some tool...almost like Twitter but supporting embedded video...so that he could go in and change a "Video of the Day," without much trouble or without knowing much about HTML.

posted by johngoren to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

Put a whole crapload of comments in the HTML file so it's obvious where he should paste the embed code from YT? Even if he doesn't know HTML, I would imagine that would be pretty easy.

Of course, then he'd have to upload the new html file himself.
posted by aheckler at 11:53 AM on April 14, 2008

You can also use an inline frame, or if you want to be fancy PHP or a server-side include or the like to include youtubelink.ext, which can contain only the HTML. Tell him to edit this file, and copy/paste what he wants into it.
posted by Rendus at 11:58 AM on April 14, 2008

Best answer: Check out CushyCMS. It does exactly what you want.
posted by o2b at 12:06 PM on April 14, 2008 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: CushyCMS looks amazing!
posted by johngoren at 12:22 PM on April 14, 2008

Teh inline solution, combined with ahecklers commenting-the-hell-out0-of-everything, seems liek a nice safe, simplwe solution providing you can get the admin to use FTP.

Over the years that I’ve been building websites I’ve run into this sort of situation quite often, and my usual solution is to teach people FTP (it’s within most peoples grasp – just give them a program and a checklist of steps) and some kind of editor (dreamweaver being the bets, as you can use it’s templating options to restrict the user to editable areas where they can’t break much). In this case the editor would probably just get in the way though.
posted by Artw at 12:29 PM on April 14, 2008

Wow. Typos.
posted by Artw at 12:35 PM on April 14, 2008

And yeah, Cushy CMS actually looks like a very good solution for this type of problem.
posted by Artw at 12:35 PM on April 14, 2008

CushyCMS does indeed look, um, interesting, provided you trust them. All your FTP logins are belong to us, bwahahaha.
posted by bricoleur at 12:54 PM on April 14, 2008

That's a good point, bricoleur! I just signed up for an account to play with, but I think I'll go back and create a separate cushycms login that only has access to my test page...
posted by lou at 1:58 PM on April 14, 2008

I have used pMachine (which has been superseded by another CMS, I think), it had functionality it called "pBlocks" that allow you to log in through a web-based interface and change text that was predefined as a "pBlock" in the HTML. A benefit of this was that someone could change text in the pBlock without having to ever touch the HTML -- it was all done through a very easy web-based interface.

I figured that a lot of CMS would have something similar.
posted by jayder at 2:14 PM on April 14, 2008

Why not just use PHP to include a text file that contains the variable data?
posted by jbickers at 3:44 AM on April 15, 2008