SDL Tridion's New In-Context Website Editor Empowers Business Users

By Barb Mosher | Published Nov 4, 2009

SDL Tridion (news, site) has increased the power of the business with a new tool for their web content management system. SiteEdit 2009 is an in-context web editor that pushes the management of a website's content out to the business owners, removing the notion that web publishing needs to be centralized to be controlled.

In Context Editing

There are a number of ways to manage content within SDL Tridion's web content management system. The primary user interface to the Content Manager is the Content Manager Explorer. The Explorer is used by any user who needs to manage the website or its contents including marketing, communications, developers and IT staff.

But to really put some control of the content into the hands of business owners, a new editing tool has been provided: SiteEdit 2009. SiteEdit is an in-context WYSIWYG editor that is accessed via the browser.

Along with the ability to create, edit and view content within the context of the website itself, SiteEdit allows the management of sections of the website to be pushed out to various divisions, departments or even offices around the world.

SiteEdit comes complete with security, workflow, versioning and auditing capabilities to ensure that users can only change sections of a website, or components of a specific web page that they are allowed to.

Advanced Editing

Although touted as designed to be easy to use for business owners who don't have experience with HTML, there are features that support advanced editors as well.

SiteEdit includes the ability to view metadata, SEO and layout templates and view version information.

In addition, SiteEdit can be used in the language of the editor, supporting multilingual websites and web editors. A multi-language spellchecker completes the multilingual support.

Supporting Content Creation

SiteEdit is the latest way to support the management of websites built on SDL Tridion's Web CMS. Other approaches include the Content Manager Explorer (mentioned above), Web DAV and authoring via MS Word.