Web site app for managing "lists"

[OccasionalFlyer]

This is not a question precisely about HTML but I'm hoping that, since
authors of HTML generally are creating or maintaining pages for web
sites that I might get some information. I am the new webmaster for
the web site of a non-profit academic organization (read: I do this
for free as a volunteer). The president of the organization wants to
add a place to the site that lists recent publications by members. We
used to do this in print but stopped, I guess because we wanted to
save trees. So I need a tool that will a) let me enter a member's
name in an alphabetical way (so not just the next line in a page); b)
list publications for this person (complete bibliographic
information); and c) let users, any user browsing the web, be able to
look at this material but not change it. In my ideal world, this tool
(I'm hoping not to try to maintain raw HTML for this) would allow a
user to enter all the information him- or herself and it would be put
in the right spot, rather than sending me the info in email and me
having to enter it all.

Does anyone know of a tool that can be added to a web site to do
most/all of this for me? One of my colleague's suggested Drupal but
he noted that it would take a while to learn enough to be able to add
it to a web site and use it. I'm willing to sacrifice sophistication
for simplicity of adding it to the site and using it over a powerful
tool that wil take me three months of evenings to figure out. This
might be like Zotero in that it accepts input for the appropriate
fields but it needs to have separate lists for n number of members.
Thanks.

Ken

 

[Adrienne Boswell]

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed OccasionalFlyer <[email protected]>
writing in (e-mail address removed):

This is not a question precisely about HTML but I'm hoping that, since
authors of HTML generally are creating or maintaining pages for web
sites that I might get some information. I am the new webmaster for
the web site of a non-profit academic organization (read: I do this
for free as a volunteer). The president of the organization wants to
add a place to the site that lists recent publications by members. We
used to do this in print but stopped, I guess because we wanted to
save trees. So I need a tool that will a) let me enter a member's
name in an alphabetical way (so not just the next line in a page); b)
list publications for this person (complete bibliographic
information); and c) let users, any user browsing the web, be able to
look at this material but not change it. In my ideal world, this tool
(I'm hoping not to try to maintain raw HTML for this) would allow a
user to enter all the information him- or herself and it would be put
in the right spot, rather than sending me the info in email and me
having to enter it all.

Does anyone know of a tool that can be added to a web site to do
most/all of this for me? One of my colleague's suggested Drupal but
he noted that it would take a while to learn enough to be able to add
it to a web site and use it. I'm willing to sacrifice sophistication
for simplicity of adding it to the site and using it over a powerful
tool that wil take me three months of evenings to figure out. This
might be like Zotero in that it accepts input for the appropriate
fields but it needs to have separate lists for n number of members.
Thanks.

Ken

It's really pretty basic. You need some server side scripting and a
database. PHP and MySQL should do fine for you. All you have to do is
query the database and loop though the records.

Here's a select query for you:
SELECT author, publication, href, added FROM authors ORDER BY author

Here's an insert query for you:
INSERT INTO authors (author, publication, href, added) VALUES
('Charles Dickens','A Tale of Two Cities','It was the best of times, it
was the worst of times','http://example.com',CURDATE())

The good thing about doing this is that you will learn something that
you can use later on, and charge for it.

 

[dorayme]

<[email protected]

,

This is not a question precisely about HTML but I'm hoping that, since
authors of HTML generally are creating or maintaining pages for web
sites that I might get some information. I am the new webmaster for
the web site of a non-profit academic organization (read: I do this
for free as a volunteer). The president of the organization wants to
add a place to the site that lists recent publications by members. We
used to do this in print but stopped, I guess because we wanted to
save trees. So I need a tool that will a) let me enter a member's
name in an alphabetical way (so not just the next line in a page); b)
list publications for this person (complete bibliographic
information); and c) let users, any user browsing the web, be able to
look at this material but not change it. In my ideal world, this tool
(I'm hoping not to try to maintain raw HTML for this) would allow a
user to enter all the information him- or herself and it would be put
in the right spot, rather than sending me the info in email and me
having to enter it all.

Does anyone know of a tool that can be added to a web site to do
most/all of this for me? One of my colleague's suggested Drupal but
he noted that it would take a while to learn enough to be able to add
it to a web site and use it. I'm willing to sacrifice sophistication
for simplicity of adding it to the site and using it over a powerful
tool that wil take me three months of evenings to figure out. This
might be like Zotero in that it accepts input for the appropriate
fields but it needs to have separate lists for n number of members.
Thanks.

How about letting some self-organising force do most of the work?
You get a name list (with email addresses) of all the members,
you put it in alphabetical order by name, you send out a doc of
this (its structure to be described later by me or others) in an
email *just to the first on the list*, asking this party to add
to this list *in certain prescribed ways*. They should then
email-pass it on to the next person on the list, the last person
should return it to you.

You get back, eventually, hopefully, if you set it out right, a
comma separated text document or one that can easily be converted
into one with simple Find & Replace function in your editor. This
can then be put onto a server. It will have a name like
"publications.csv".

An html page with, say, a name like publications.php can then be
made that has some php in it that grabs this csv and (server
side) converts it into an html table.

In spite of a few hiccups that could be sorted, this might well
save you a lot of time.

 

[Andy Dingley]

Does anyone know of a tool that can be added to a web site to do
most/all of this for me?

I'd suggest MediaWiki, the wiki engine behind Wikipedia.

This is a great big pile of code, but it installs easily and without
much effort on your part. Site-specific customisation, management and
presentation skinning is pretty easy and a well-worn path with lots of
guides to follow.

You now have a tool which is a free-format CMS (content management
system) with an outward facing editing interface that's closely linked
to the viewing interface. You can lock this down so that only known
users can either view or edit (sounds like public open reading,
controlled user list editing and no ability to self-create new
accounts would be what you need.)

Unlike earlier CMS, editing with a wiki looks a lot like reading with
a wiki. Most other non-wiki CMS, even blog engines, have a big
separation between "adding stories to the newsbase" and "reading the
collected newspaper".

So you now have a powerful wiki at the disposal of your organisation.
That's a good thing - there's a lot you can do with it.

As to handling lists of publications, then I'd look at MediaWiki
templates. This is how citation is handled on Wikipedia. You fill in
the slots for authors, titles, even DOIs and the formatted output is
done for you.

For auto-generation of sorted lists, look at categorization in
MediaWiki and the DPL (Dynamic Page Listing) extension. You can do a
_lot_ with this (although it's a little server hungry, so not used on
Wikipedia).


This is a complex solution. But it's complexity that you download for
free, rather than having to build yourself. Total cost of ownership is
still low.

(and buy my MediaWiki book!)

 

[OccasionalFlyer]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I hope that the ISP will allow me to
add a program like this.