Personally, I would just have a set / static header.txt & footer.txt file(s) and have the user modify the content. Thus, if I wanted to change the navigation/banners/layout, as long as I had the new templates written to properly display the included content files, things would propagate seamlessly.

Server Side Includes would be a must for this application. Each user would have their index.html file, and all it would consist of would be SSI calls to include:

header.txt
content.txt
footer.txt

Its really not that complicated. But takes some getting used to. This way meta tags cant really be used, and I would take into consideration the notes from the node above as well..
I hope this sheds some light on the subject,

_14k4 - webmaster@860.org (www.poorheart.com)

In reply to Re: (Ovid) Re(2): User-updatable web sites by one4k4
in thread User-updatable web sites by Stamp_Guy

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.