ContentSeed
Live Editing for your Web Site
Over the past few years, several components have
surfaced that allow for easy live editing of Web site content. If you've
never incorporated this functionality into one of your sites, you really don't
know what you're missing! Not only does this provide you with the ability
to update your site on the fly right inside of the Web browser, but it also
allows you to provide that same ability to your clients! Now that's power!
Here's how ContentSeed works. (I'm using the ASP
version of ContentSeed for this article, but a PHP version is also available.)
After you've identified where you want your editable content, you insert a
ContentSeed seed into the page. The seed consists of ASP
code that provides the implementation for ContentSeed.
The process of adding a seed is made simple by either
one of two methods:
- If you're using FrontPage, ContentSeed includes a
FrontPage Web Component that lets you add a seed with a simple click of the
mouse.
- If you're not using FrontPage, you can use the
seed code that is included in a text file that ships with ContentSeed.
Either way, once you've added your seed, you are ready
to browse to the page and test it out! When the Web page comes up in the
browser, there will be no indication that it's anything other than a normal
page, but if you hit Ctrl-Y on your keyboard, you will be prompted to
login for page editing as shown below.
Figure 1 - ContentSeed's Login Screen
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