Hi
I'm helping to run a site for a Church with an excellent history, and I've recently been asked to produce a community-update-able resource for the church's various monuments and historic artefacts. The basis for the content will be a survey undertaken by NADFA (http://www.nadfas.org.uk/) and should contain both images and formatted text. The hosting will be a Linux shared-hosting solution with all of the usual perks and restrictions (e.g. PHP, MySQL, no shell access, etc.), and I think will be distinct from the main site in both integration and appearance, though some customisation would be preferred.
So far these requirements can be any by any number of software solutions, but the one I'm struggling with is appropriate validation of updates. The requirement put to me was that the public should be able to submit content, but that this content should be screened before it is made available on the site. The founding philosophy of most wiki software appears to low restriction, concentration on reverting to earlier article versions rather than screening - this isn't a favoured approach for the church.
I'm struggling to come up options. I've experimented with a couple of wikis, but struggled to make progress.
Is there a good solution to my problem? What are the alternatives / best compromises?
Any help appreciated. Thanks
Stuart
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Stuart, if you were not so sure that you wanted PHP and MySQL etc then I would suggest using a hosted wiki, Wikidot (http://www.wikidot.com), which can handle such screening. Using dataforms (Wikidot's CMS) the public would submit articles which would automatically be saved in a "draft" category. This category would not be visible on the site but only viewable/editable by admins. After an admin had reviewed the submission s/he would switch the category to "published" or whatever public category was relevant to the content. It would then be displayed on the site, formatted according to what you had set up in the CMS.
But as you do want to use PHP and MYSQL then you might want to investigate Mindtouch (http://www.mindtouch.com/). I'm not sure how well it handles the screening you want to do but I suspect it won't be a problem.
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Thanks for the suggestions, but I'm afraid that I may need some more.
MindTouch has the limiting dependency of having mono installed (which is often not on shared hosting, and is not provided by my host) and requires shell access. Wikidot is worth a second look, but I'd prefer something I can host myself if I can.
PHP is not a requirement - it's just that it's what I know and it's a good example of what is installed on shared hosting.
Any more thoughts?
Stuart
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