Is Cocoon for us?

[Duane Morin]

The environment I've inherited is already very XML oriented, with a number of XSL to produce our final output (webpage or HTML email). The current bottleneck is that there's too much in the XSL, and not enough XSL resources. So whenever a marketing person, designer, or whoever wants to change something, they have to go get a developer. Even if it's as simple as changing a block of introductory text.

What I'd love is to find an "add on" content manager (everything is in CVS now and unlikely to change in the short term) that would enable content people to do something like take a file called Welcome.xml, be given a form with fields like "body", "age", "priority" and anything else that we would have stored with the XML, and edit the values without having to know XML. (In my former life we used Documentum which was pretty good at this, but outrageously expensive.)

Then that file gets checked back into CVS and we build it into our normal process like it had been hand edited.

Second requirement is on the other side of the fence -- designer wants to check in some new XSL, but wants to apply it to a test XML block first and view the output. I know that many XSL editors allow this, but I thought that if I could find it in a content management solution then it would not require everybody to use the same editor.

Is Cocoon something I should be looking at? I thought it might be, but after installing it and looking around a bit I'm worried that it expects me to use some other XML format rather than what I already have.

Duane

 

[Bob Sparks]

I inherited a coccon system and believe me it wasn't any easier. You can't replace a professional wysiwyg with a bunch of transforms no matter how clever.