A few minutes ago, while trying to help a colleague create a web page in a proprietary Content Management System, I finally had to advise her to compose her complicated page of tabular data in Dreamweaver and then paste the resulting HTML code into the CMS text editor. And I feel very, very dirty.

So why would I make such a bizarre recommendation? Well, for starters, unless you add a border or background color to a table's cells, the CMS text editor doesn't outline the cells at all. So trying to insert your cursor into the row and column you want to edit is a bit like trying to pick a door on "Let's Make a Deal."

Truth be told, the way such complex pages should work in a CMS-driven site is that there should be a template in place so that all a user had to do is enter her data into a form containing only plain text fields. Upon hitting the "Submit" button, the data record she just entered should automatically be displayed, along with all other records of the same type, in a table based on the template we already created. The content provider never has to worry about formatting the table once it's been defined in the template.

Hmmm... that sounds a lot like CCK, Views and Themes in Drupal.

Is the proprietary CMS capable of doing the same thing? Probably. Does anybody have a clue how to do it? Nope. Do I already know how to do it in Drupal? You bet.

By the way, have I mentioned that tom boone dot com is powered with Drupal? Ah, home sweet home.