Submission System
July 10, 2000
There are two ways to go for the submission system. You can either let
the writer write in his/her own choice of editors, or you can force
them to use a web based form (with a textarea element) to submit their
content. Naturally, the first option would be a more robust choice
(not to mention friendlier for your writers), but more difficult than
the latter choice. Either way, you'll want to store this content
somewhere, which usually means putting it in a file that resides on
the server.
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NOTE:
You may choose to store the content in a database instead of a
file. While this will allow you to keep track of and perform
database functions on the content more easily, if your content
is long and/or you have a lot of content, your database can
balloon to extraordinary proportions. Not to mention that the
articles will have to be generated dynamically when a visitor
tries to view them, which adds more overhead to the server. We
will use text files for simplicity's sake in this article.
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Should I let the writers choose?
We'll talk briefly about the first method of submission, that is,
letting the writer choose his own medium. While this does seem like
the best route to take, there are a few compatibility issues. Firstly,
chances are that your all writers may use different word processors,
and no one will be able to read another person's document. So unless
you want to go out and buy licenses for all of the different editors
people use, you'll have to coordinate compatible versions. The next
issue is obvious - for people to be able to read articles online
(ie web site visitors), the articles need to be in plain text format;
Word Perfect, Lotus, MS Word, etc formats won't work. So you'll have
to convert the documents into plain text.
Unless you know the binary file format of the document and some heavy
programming, or a copy of the application is installed on the
server, you'll most likely not be able to get the actual text and/or
images out of the document. One solution is to require your writers to
convert the documents into something you can manipulate first. Many
popular word processors these days allow you to 'export as html' or
'save as web page.' This would be ideal, since such pages are straight
text files and can easily be manipulated. Or, you could simply have
them write HTML or text files and submit those.
If, however, none of the above options are feasible, you'll have to
resort to the second method, which is to make the writers submit the
content through a web-based form.
What is content management?
Content Management Made Easy with ASP
The Back End
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