Taz, it might be too light for your needs, but given that you are in a hurry, I won't waste time trying to see if it fits your needs...I have used Crimson Editor on occasion here for some lightweight editing. It's not that pretty, but for text editing, etc., it might do the trick. It does a nice job of separating out the code from the text via colour etc.

Thanks, richat. It's good to have a list of several possibilities... Though - d'oh - I forgot to mention that the today thing is Mac.

I've used Contribute for this a number of times and clients seems to like it; pretty much anyone who knows Word can use it and there's a handy "rollback" feature so if they make a mistake they can quickly jump back to the previous versions of the page. Works best in conjunction with Dreamweaver templates which allow you to 'protect' certain areas from client-editing: no breaking the navigation or adding in new font styles, for example. The "check-in/out" feature is also handy to prevent multiple people editing the same page at the same time, too. It comes in Mac flavours.

But my first choice for these things is to build content-management into the site from the start; a few PHP templates and a simple database, coupled with a WYSIWYG text editor like Tiny MCE makes content updates totally painless for you and the client.

One word: Wiki.

They should be able to get their heads around that markup, even if they're as clueless as you make out.

Or perhaps something like EditThisPage.php, on which you can allow them to edit as much or as little as you think they can cope with.

I gave up Dreamweaver on the Mac years ago when it couldn't handle CSS previews worth a darn. I tried Nvu but was completely underwhelmed. It's not bad, but since it's based on the Mozilla browser, it's rather resource-intensive for what it does (at least on my older G4 system). I currently use BBEdit and CSSedit, which do pretty much everything I need except preview and manage code. If preview is an issue, Smultron is a text editor that does that. I use Subversion to manage files. Probably too geeky for your users, but there it is.

Ooh. I just got a call, and that meeting's been postponed (see, kids? It always pays to procrastinate).

So I'll give you a bit more info. One of my clients, for example, is a musician. The things he will be editing are photo gallery images, record titles for sale (w/thumbnails), and mp3 clips and samples, plus an event calendar that he's already doing (I just showed him how to edit the source code for that). Virtually all of my jobs are small, "pretty" sites, not corporate juggernauts with a gajillion people who have to share and edit pages.

I have used CuteHTML for ages and, if you buy CuteFTP (which I also use), you get CuteHTML for free. Or the other way around or something. I actually use (and actually bought with money and everything!) CuteHTML Pro, because it has lots of tools for checking for errors and validating mark-up. It uses colour-coding as you type to confirm that tags have been closed correctly etc, which is good for clumsy typists like me.

It does mean they would need to learn some basic HTML and FTP stuff, but if they are just updating the sites rather than creating them from scratch, the barrer is not too high for moderately intelligent humans. Maybe you could screw some extra money from them for training?

Oh, just re-read your comment and saw the Mac thing, so the above may be a crock of shit.

Thanks, though, dg. All ideas appreciated.