Editable through admin panel website templates (HTML, CSS, JS..) Good or bad?

Question

This question is for web developers and architects.

How do you think is it a good or bad idea to have a website where you're able to edit all the templates (HTML, CSS, JS, images..) right from the admin panel?

In this case if you update website often, you don't need to search for a local version of your website on you development machine, search for a specific page, make modifications, commit it to source control server, make deployment.. Instead, all you need is just right click on the page or any element on this page, click Edit, update a piece of HTML and click SAVE - 30 seconds maximum - all from your browser ;)

You still can have version control system with this approach and rollback any template which was modified by mistake by 2 mouse clicks on a website.

I personally like this approach and need to know your opinion. So what do you think?

Note, we are talking about big websites which have to be updated often, multilingual ones etc.

Realworld web-applications which use this approach:

• Wordpress
• vBulletin

Answer 1

Personally, I think it would depend on the complexity of the website.

What you're talking about here is directly editing the structure (and potentially behaviour) of a live website. Sure, it may take longer to make the changes on your development server before rolling them out but if there's any chance of breaking either the appearance or functionality of the site then I'd think definitely think twice.

Answer 2

You shouldn't be allowed to modify the entire layout of your site through the site itself in my opinion. The reasons being the lack of version control and the inability to preview what you are doing, which translate into the inability to come back to an older version. Plus if you modify it locally, you are allowed to make errors that break everything, a luxury you can't always afford if you're doing it directly through the website.

Being able to add/remove content through the website is great though, it would be very painful to update a blog by modifying your HTML each time!

Answer 3

I once created a site that did exactly that. (Well, without any option for source control - had to learn that one the hard way...) Looking back at what I did there, a few things come to mind:

• It was a traditional website with information about my sports club, that only changed occasionally, not a web app in the modern sense.
• I wanted to be able to apply fixes even though I had no access to my dev machine (because it was a private project, I was at work, and ftp connections were not allowed by the comapny proxy).

For those specific reasons, the approach was a good solution. Today I would use one of the many good frameworks for this purpose (Joomla, Drupal etc) instead of coding it myself.

On important item: I was able to edit the pages that were used to generate the main site, but not the generation program or my admin pages. For those, I had to use my dev machine and upload file changes by ftp.

I think it is a good approach, if done correctly (my implementation certainly wasn't)

Answer 4

Editing HTML/CSS/JS files through your web browser can make things easier, as long as the editing implementation is neat, organized, idiot-proof, and keeps track of revisions.

A major issue to consider is security. The inability to modify actual files from the content management system in most software packages is a security precaution.

Learn to use a version control system effectively and efficiently. Tools like git or bzr can take care of a lot of the tedious stuff automatically, like package building, uploading, etc.

Answer 5

I hate it. Web development, much like the web servers themselves, shouldn't be "comfortable". Web development should be a mother gentle caressing scary experience. It should sound, look, even taste dangerous.

Neophyte web developers should be put through their paces learning the subtler aspects of their chosen text editor before they are even allowed to open a web browser; and not be allowed near a graphical web browser before 6 months of working only using lynx for debugging.

Laziness is our bane. No more, I say.

Edit: This is, perhaps, a bit tangential to the issue at hand. It should also be mentioned that visual identity that is too simple to change will change too often, leading to confused and frustrated users.