Customer wants to update site

[technoknow]

Hi,
I'm writing a proposal for a car dealer that wants to be able to update the site himself with new pictures and prices by just filling out a form and clicking a button.
I've done a site with ASP and Access and have thought about doing the same here.
My question is how can I set it up so that he can upload the images without using an FTP program? Can I use ASP to have an admin page with a "Browse" button that the user then navigates to the image on his computer and is uploaded to the server?

Thanks,
Jim

 

[Veep]

Short answer: Yes, as long as you have an upload utility.
Here's a freebee that works great.

http://www.lewismoten.com/LewiesCodeLibrary/Details.htm?folder=ASP/UploadFilesWithoutCOMv3

 

[Tarwn]

I would also like to an a suggestion for you as far as the content is concerned. I built a site not to long ago that is completely customizeable (as far as text and images are concerned). I spent some extra time building in a caching method. Basically I was looking at it like this:
1) No Cache: When they update the site a little bit of work is done, for every single visitor that loads a page we have to hit th database
2) Caching: Updating the site takes a little bt more juice, but every customer who comes to the site gets static info sent to them instead of hitting the db

Basically what I did was i used the admin pages to build HTML files that I saved to a folder using a FileSystemObject. The front pages would then include those files where they were needed. Obviously there would abe an erro displayed if anyone went in and manually deleted those static html include files, but by saving to a dbv (or data file) and saving out a static html file you get the advantage of having the content cached but also making the content easy to edit from an admin page.

basically the way I set up the pages I knew there would be images in certain locations and text in certain locations, so I built template pages that mnirrored the real site, except i used text inputs in plkace of text paragraphs and supplied dropdowns (you could use file inputs) under each picture. When they submitted the changes I would update my data files, copy the new image over to my active image directory and name it a specific name (so no matter which image was picked, the HTML img tag always had the same name, no need to store that in the db that way). The text would be written to a file with the appropriate HTML for the section it was being included for. It's a little more complex then just hitting the databse each time, but this lowers the loading time and reduces the burden on the db.

Anyways, just wanted to add that, feel free to ask questions if you want to try to go this route, I'm always around

BTW, the site I was referring to was

http://www.billparr.com/

All of the text in the site is editable, he can add titles and sub-paragraphs all day long. The front image is selectable (so if it looks funny it ain't my fault ). The gallery and portfolio listings are all dynamically generated from the db, though I may have used a cahching routine on them also (differant ten the content caching routine). Plus there is no limit to the number of galleries, portfolio's, etc that he can add. The only thing that is not editable by him is the color scheme, styles, header/footer, and the little header text images. All of the other content can be edited from an admin page down to selecting which image in a gallery he would like to use as the main thumbnail image.

Anyways, didn't mean to ramble on,

-T

 

[Genimuse]

Ah, the good old dynamic vs. published static debate.

I've built quite a few sites both ways, myself. If you're not tracking the user (with sessions and such), the pages aren't customized based on the user (such that you don't have to create 16 different versions of the same page depending on the user's preferences or path or what have you), and you're expecting a reasonable load, I love to creat publshed static sites.

If you need tracking or customization then you've got to go dynamic. I love both models, though, as well as hybrids.

Best of luck on your project! The upload method Veep mentioned is quite cool. Just be certain to provide really, really good instructions to the users on formatting the pictures (dimensions, size, etc.).