For quite some time now I have been using ProWorkFlow for my time tracking and project management, which I found to be the most fully featured of all the project management solutions I tried and really is very good. However the amount of development work I do these days is very small, so I couldn't really warrant paying for something that gets used so rarely, so I decided it was time to look for an alternative and preferably FREE solution.
I recently came across this rather nifty new service (called ICE for short) from Adobe, which essentially allows you to add basic content management facilities to any website with zero coding and allow your clients to manage it via their browser. You just take a simple flat HTML page, add in some markup to identify editable regions and your done. Granted it has very basic WYSIWYG capabilities, but it is perfect for those small clients who only want basic editing capabilities and don't have much money to spend on implementing a fully featured solution even with an open source CMS such as the very cool Mura CMS.
If you already use Dreamweaver then you already have everything you need to get started and easily create Incontext editable regions, but there are in fact no special requirements for using this service, you do not need to use Dreamweaver other than to create the javascript files, so you could in effect just download a Dreamweaver trial to see how it works and get the code then you can insert the required markup via notepad if you wish. To use the service all you need to do is sign up for an Adobe ID, and then login to the IncontextEditing Admin portal. From here you setup and manage your sites. Check out the getting started video below.
Currently the InContext Editing service is FREE and in the forums Adobe have quoted that it will remain free until 2011, after which it will be a subscription service costing $10-$20 per month. This information was actually quite hard to find, I tried calling Adobe to enquire about pricing, I spoke to customer services, sales and technical support and amazingly no-one had any idea what Incontext Editing was or that it was even an Adobe product.
To get started with ICE try out these tutorials.
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