FileMaker as a Content Management System for Web Publishing

[fm_enthusiast]

Dear List Members,

Instant Web Publishing and Custom Web Publishing sound great. But can FileMaker be seriously used as a content management system for a content website with text and images and tables mingled (text runs around the image or table) on any given webpage? Can an image (say stored in a container field) be positioned anywhere on the webpage at a specified scale (say the image stored in the container field has a size of 500x500 pixels, but I want it to be displayed as a size of 100x75 pixels)? Can all these be accomplished in FileMaker in conjunction with XSLT or PHP? I really appreciate your guidance on these.

[Garry Claridge]

I can't see any reasons why it can't be accomplished.

Garry

[mlindal]

IWP will have some limitation - but with some sweat, you can make it do some very useful things quickly.

For more advanced integration - look at PHP

[fm_enthusiast]

Hi,

Thank you both for your response. I have tried to publish the content via PHP (fx.php) and XML (XSLT) export. Text styles such as bold, italic, Greek characters, and superscript/subscript in Filemaker text fields would not show up on the web. These text styles are important to me. Any comments or work-arounds on these? Thanks a lot.

[mlindal]

You need to use styles on your web solution.

Set up CSS styles and then assign them on your PHP page to correspond with the data you are getting from Filemaker.

[mlindal]

I should add that if you are very new to PHP, a quick start is available through fmwebschool.com

FXForge.net has a tool that writes the PHP code for you.

After 8 hours you should be cranking out cool looking web pages.

[Steve T.]

Hi! Content Management Systems (CMS) can be simple or extremely complex. IMHO, FM should be able to act as the database backend for just about any CMS, but the real 'work' is going to be the PHP or other scripting. If you're a programmer/coder and designing your own CMS, you may want to look at some open source projects and port some of their code if you don't write your own, just be sure to be aware of any condidtions such as the GNU GPL http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html that might apply.

Most of the systems I've looked at are PHP/MySQL, a good selection of which are testable at http://www.opensourcecms.com, but they may inspire you for your PHP/FM CMS project.

--ST