Inline editing, Edit in Place or "Wiki style" content editing

Inline editing (edit in place or wiki style editing) are popular buzzwords for features that is now available to website editors using web content management systems.  But what does it mean for your website?  I thought I'd take a few moments to explain.

Except for a few traditionally high end enterprise content management systems, most systems for editing website content have involved an online form which you fill in (in the industry it is often referred to as a data template) to create the content for a page.

There are a number of problems with this approach:

• Convenience - sometimes you just want to edit one line of text, not whole pages, so you may not want to go through of loading your website's admin system in a new page or screen to do small changes.
• Visualisation - One of the biggest issues with this type of approach is that for content editors and end users, it isn't really WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get).  In other words, they have real problems visualising what the page is going to look like. 
  
• Ease of Use - Even the most basic content management systems have an ever increasing range of fields for all sorts of special content such as metadata.  This can require specialised training and introduces a conceptual barrier for new editors.
  

In response to these problems, inline editing has been adopted by some.  The idea is that you can edit a title or text exactly where you see it on the screen.  This usually involves logging into the website and then a single click on a little icon placed next to the content that you can edit and even dragging and dropping elements around the screen to modify basic layouts.  This makes it convenient, easiest to visualise and should make the system intuitive enough for just about anyone to use with minimal training.

With emerging trends such as Web2.0 and specifically technologies such as AJAX that don't require the screen to be reloaded, the concept of inline content editing is becoming very popular.  But there are advantages and disadvantages to this approach.

However there are also some disadvantages of inline editing:

• Security - inline editing can effectively expose the administration of the website to hackers so it is critical that such a system is robust and secure.
• Power Users - some administrators will want to continue to access the benefits of full data template style editing (such as publishing rules - scheduled publishing, expiry etc).  Fully inline editing systems can seem basic and limited to these types of users and they may feel that they are not able to get the most out of the system.
• Structure - in some websites, it isn't always possible to visualise structure from the front-end of the website including content heirarchy and taxonomy.  With editors focusing on inline editing this type of editing can suffer similar problems to full wikis.
  
• Content Duplication - editing in place can potentially create duplicated content because editors may not be aware of content that can be re-used and the system may not be capable of re-using content in-place
  

Any system that tries to do inline editing should take these into account.  From our experience the best systems are a hybrid of inline editing (mainly for text) and traditional data template style editing.  They should also enable a learning transition for users between the two and the website designers or developers should provide sufficient training and support to facilitate this.

Datalink are currently working on introducing inline content editing to Freestyler CMS.  One of the strengths of the system is its separation of content from presentation.  This won't change because we've considered the best solution and decided on a hybrid system taking into consideration both first time and power editors.  We also take the time to show our customers how to use the CMS to its full potential.