Is the DCT designed only for non-technical users?

Sree1988

When we design the DCT, we think that non-technical users should be able to capture data. But sometimes it becomes mandatory that the users should know the concepts of HTML or CSS. How to avoid such situations?

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

nipper

Experience.

There is a tool TinyMCE which will plug in to a DCT and will allow users to write HTML in a WYSIWYG

I almost never use that because proper definition of a DCT/TPL/XSL set will limit the need for HTML.

Faizi

DCT is just a web form that is used to capture the content/data which is being consumed in somewhere as per your implementation.

It's upto on the developer that how robust design and development has been done. Based on descriptions, labels and through validations an user will be educated and restricted while cupturing the data.

Adam Stoller

Experience.

There is a tool TinyMCE which will plug in to a DCT and will allow users to write HTML in a WYSIWYG

I almost never use that because proper definition of a DCT/TPL/XSL set will limit the need for HTML.

I would augment the above with the word "training".

Although you should be able to hide most, if not all, of the "technical" stuff by either hiding it within the DCT, handling it with FormAPI within the DCT, or massaging the content in the desired way through a PT - sometimes there is no good way to avoid requiring some aspects of technical ability for users to be able to properly populate a DCT. In such cases - training the users (and providing good documentation) is the only real solution. But you should only fall back on this if you truly cannot find any other [reasonable] way around it.

TinyMCE (and its predecessor VFE) is often unavoidable for content that requires some stylization of words within the content (e.g.: italicizing the word "words" right there) - if your users are HTML-savvy, they can just input the proper HTML directive in their content - but that's not generally acceptable. At the same time though, if you don't control things, users will use TinyMCE to make all sorts of "fancy" modifications to the content, the result of which is a disorganized and inconsistent looking site -- so if you do employ TinyMCE within your DCTs you should make sure to strip its functionality down to the bare essentials for your purposes.

For example, unless you really need to embed images in random locations within the prose content, it's better to eliminate that option from TinyMCE and provide separate fields for capturing image references (and possibly rendering location information - e.g.: "left", "right", etc.) - and then handle the incorporation of the image with the text as part of the PT or front-end XML rendering engine.

nipper

Very true. I liked the (very) old templating UI that allowed bold, italics and underline and that was it. Of course you can do that with MCE and VFE as well.

Adam Stoller

Very true. I liked the (very) old templating UI that allowed bold, italics and underline and that was it. Of course you can do that with MCE and VFE as well.

Ah - the TeamSite Templating 4.5 days ... (before it became FormsPublisher) :-)

Sree1988

Thanks everyone