How to optimally manage general and customer-specific documentation using DreamWeaver CS3 and PHP?
July 29, 2010 7:05 AM   Subscribe

How to optimally manage general and customer-specific documentation using DreamWeaver CS3 and PHP?

A few years ago, when our customer documentation management needs were simpler, our IT guys set up a DreamWeaver-/PHP-based process where we could easily set up a unique CustDocs/software build page for each customer based on the system elements they had purchased from us. Since then, our business model has become more complicated and we are now doing integration work with our customers' systems and with third parties. Some of the documents resulting from this new work can even be provided to multiple customers. Our web content management requirement has gone from hierarchical to mesh-based.

Now we are spending too much time managing our customer web pages and all the possible content permutations which arise from the different ways we now sell our systems. It's become much harder to get these pages right and keep them up-to-date.

Given that these pages are already set up for PHP-based delivery, perhaps there's an easier way for us to manage the different customer pages from within DreamWeaver? I'm picturing a GUI checklist grid with customers on one axis and documents on the other, where we can just go through and check on/off what each customer gets; maybe even copy-and-paste portions of one customer's checklist to another's.

Note that I'm currently not very close to this process, and the people who are are not web jockeys, so for all of us the simplest way that meets our requirements is the best way. Staying with DreaWeaver+PHP (would upgrade if necessary) is highly desirable.
posted by ZenMasterThis to Technology (12 answers total)
 
Response by poster: Yikes. I was hoping to get at least one good answer... :(
posted by ZenMasterThis at 8:54 AM on July 29, 2010


I can't tell from your question how dynamic your existing process is - are you doing anything fancy with the PHP, or is it basically HTML by another name?

Regardless, I think you've gone past what Dreamweaver or any static solution can do for you. If you want to fill out an online checklist to note which customers need which documents, and then have those documents appear on their customer pages as a direct result of that, you will need to do some programming. Or you could take a look at project management applications that are set up for intranet and extranet use. For example, Basecamp. Or, look for a CRM application that has tools for customer service and technical support.
posted by expialidocious at 11:54 AM on July 29, 2010


Response by poster: This is not an online checklist; this is a checklist which would be maintained (preferably within DreamWeaver) by one of our employees with FTP access to our web server, and FROM which ALL customer pages would then be dynamically generated. The checklist would need to be updated maybe once a week.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 12:32 PM on July 29, 2010


Response by poster: Ie. the checklist is backend.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 1:16 PM on July 29, 2010


Response by poster: "Table" might be a better word than "checklist." I'd like us to be able to maintain one two-dimensional binary table with customers on one dimension and documents on the other. A "0" would mean that the PHP engine SHOULD NOT include that particular document on that particular customer's page, and a "1" would mean that the PHP engine SHOULD include it.

This functionality is so obvious to me that I'd find it hard to believe that it didn't exist in DreamWeaver. Unfortunately, I know nothing about DreamWeaver.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 5:28 PM on July 29, 2010


Best answer: It escapes me why Dreamweaver would be the mechanism you'd use for this. Dreamweaver can make web pages, but it in no way makes data storage a priority.

Why now simply create a database: in it you have 3 tables:
* your clients by name
* the features available and the html document associated with each
* a table cross that cross-references these two, to store the features per client

When you clients view their site, your database gets the list of html documents specific to them.
posted by artlung at 9:11 PM on July 29, 2010


Response by poster: We're using DreamWeaver for historical reasons.

Basically I want to maintain a flat table which determines which links to our PDFs and software installers a given customer sees.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 5:19 AM on July 30, 2010


It's 100% possible I'm misunderstanding your problem, but from all you've said here, Dreamweaver is the wrong tool for this job. Locking yourself into Dreamweaver only makes it impossible to answer your question.
posted by artlung at 7:04 AM on July 30, 2010


Response by poster: ASCII (eg. CSV) table --> PHP engine --> per-customer pages with customized links to content.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 7:07 AM on July 30, 2010


Response by poster: If we could use DreamWeaver to create and maintain the table, that would be a plus, but not a requirement. Probably makes sense to use DreamWeaver to maintain the PHP code that creates the pages.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 7:20 AM on July 30, 2010


Best answer: Dreamweaver is not a good environment for developing or maintaining this kind of PHP code, unless you want to use their built-in tools to access databases and generate results pages. (My advice: Don't.) And Dreamweaver is not the right choice for editing CSV files either.

The way you want to do this, you're going to be jumping through a lot of hoops to avoid using a database, and you'll end up with a solution that breaks at the first change in your process. With a many-to-many relationship such as you are describing, a flat file is not a good approach.

If you don't want to use CRM or project-management software, it's not much harder to do what artlung suggested than it would be to write PHP code to parse your CSV file. In my opinion it's easier to create a script that looks up things from a database and displays them in a dynamic page than it is to run a batch process that generates a collection of static files and saves them to your server. Updating the information is a bit more complex, but worth the effort.
posted by expialidocious at 10:49 AM on July 30, 2010


Response by poster: I was hoping my CSV file idea could generate pages dynamically, not as batch. The advantage in my mind would be that I could easily view and print my CSV file to see who's entitled to a given PDF, and which PDFs a given customer is entitled to. I guess we could do the same thing with a relational database.

I probably should've mentioned that our customer base is not very large; between 50 and 100, and we have about 100 documents to manage.

But if a small relational database is really the way to go, then we'll look into it. Thanks!
posted by ZenMasterThis at 11:19 AM on July 30, 2010


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