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Ask HN: Are there any SAAS options for theme editors?

1 points by gnaritas ↗ HN
My boss loves Weebly because it's WSIWYG and simple enough for non-technical people to build a site with. We're give our affiliates the ability to skin our app, but we simply allow them to edit raw HTML files which get copied to production when they publish. I'd love to plug into a SAAS app that makes it simple for non technical people to modify their theme without having to build it in house. What are my options?

Edit: I'm not looking for just a CMS, I want to be able to pull the theme back into my app as static HTML files to deploy in the existing theme system.

4 comments

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anujkk
I may be wrong but what I understood is that currently you have wordpress-like setup for theming your web application : Theme developers upload theme files(html/css/images) to publish it on production server. What you now need is the ability of average non-technical user to modify and save any standard theme online without the need to touch html/css code. Something similar to tumblr : http://oi39.tinypic.com/339lpfk.jpg

Right? I don't know about any SAAS that will let you do that and even if it does it will be difficult to integrate with your system. Why not develop it yourself or outsource it to some professional developer? All you need to do is-

- present copy of a default theme to customize

- let user change text using inline editing

- let user change/upload images

- let user select different colors/fonts using forms

- optional html/css editor for advanced users

- Save and apply the changes

gnaritas
Your understanding is correct, but the whole point was I don't want to build it or have it built if there's something existing I can plug into.

In any case, so far you're not wrong, I've found a few remote cms's now that I know what to look for that will hook into my system via FTPS, but they all seem to assume wrongly that it's a static site they're editing rather than small static chunks that get pulled into a dynamic site that can't be live previewed.

They all also seem to assume paths are from the root so editing images doesn't work. That's perhaps my fault and may require that I restructure how my skins work but I haven't decided yet.