Selectively edited documents?

December 16, 2011 7:22 PM

What is the best way to present a document online that is editable by some users, but not others?

I want to create a series of documents that will be easily edited by a group of users, but read-only for most people. It should be as WSYWIG as possible (I don't want the editors to have to learn wiki markup language, for example), and have the ability to show text and images. It should also be hosted under the domain of our website.

What is the best tool to accomplish this?

posted by mamessner to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

I have no idea about the hosting side of things, but Google Docs does exactly this. You can control who can view and edit each document by playing with the settings. The only issue might be if users don't have a google account--but they can very easily get one.
posted by melancholyplay at 7:54 PM on December 16, 2011 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I looked at Google docs, but yeah - I'd rather the users be able to see the documents without having to sign up for anything, and I'd like them hosted on our site.

Does anyone have experience with TWiki?
posted by mamessner at 8:21 PM on December 16, 2011

How are they going to be editable by some people and read-only to others if no one has to sign up for anything, or you at least create accounts for them beforehand?
posted by XMLicious at 9:28 PM on December 16, 2011

I want to create a series of documents that will be easily edited by a group of users, but read-only for most people.

This describes, probably literally, every single CMS ever. In terms of modern CMS offerings, WYSIWYG doesn't narrow it down very much. What other requirements are there?
posted by toomuchpete at 9:40 PM on December 16, 2011

Response by poster: I want to have permissions, essentially, so that users with no coding knowledge can make WYSIWYG changes to the documents, but visitors to the site can't. I understand that most CMS programs can handle this, but the only ones I'm familiar with are Joomla and Wordpress, and both are too complex.
posted by mamessner at 12:01 AM on December 17, 2011

It sounds like a solution might be to set up just the WYSIWYG editor component by itself rigged up with simple server-side code that can edit and save flat HTML files. Here's Wikipedia's list of editor components; some times they come with code samples that do exactly that.

There's one called Maquetta that seems to operate in that mode by default, using a server-side Java application.
posted by XMLicious at 1:09 AM on December 17, 2011

Oh, and I forgot to say, if you had that set up, with most web servers you could use simple HTTP authentication so that only some people could get in to the editing interface. I didn't look close enough at Maquetta to see how it works in that respect.
posted by XMLicious at 1:18 AM on December 17, 2011

concrete5 might do the trick.

You are always going to have some degree of training involved with a CMS. Also, what type of documents are you talking about? Are you envisioning Office docs with a read-only preview for non-editors, or can the documents be HTML pages?
posted by benzenedream at 1:30 AM on December 17, 2011

Response by poster: Concrete5 looks perfect! I'm going to run it past my webdev to see if we can implement it just for the few pages that need to be editable by our managers. Thanks!
posted by mamessner at 1:27 PM on December 19, 2011