CityDesk alternative

Question

It seems to me that Fog Creek no longer intend to invest time on CityDesk (that by the way I like a lot). Am I right? Is there any alternative to this nice piece of software?

A friend of mine, a photographer, asked me to give him a simple Windows software package to manage and update his website. The site is static, and he knows a little bit of HTML and CSS. I like the 'template' feature of CityDesk, and I would like to introduce him to this concept and at the same time streamline his website management. Can you help me?

EDIT: Sorry for not mentioning it before, but it has to be a desktop client app, since his hosting provider and his "Windows" server are both pretty hard to configure and manage (no ssh, pay per db, no WordPress , no Ruby nor Rails...etc.) and he has already paid for two years with them.

Answer 1

Is it possible to ask him to use WordPress or Blogspot? Web based blogging engines are much more versatile and useful than desktop ones.

Answer 2

You can use Kompozer (which is a bit different to CityDesk) as an Desktop App as well as Adobe Dreamweaver (which is paid software).

As an alternative you can use server side content management systems like the following (to name just a few):

• Drupal
• Joomla
• Typo3 (which might be a bit overkill)
• Wordpress
• Textpattern

Answer 3

When we were still working on CityDesk, we considered Adobe Contribute to be one of our competitors.

I'd suggest taking a look at that site, and also there are plugins for Wordpress that will upload a static published site somewhere, so you could install Wordpress on your local machine, publish a static copy of the site and then ftp it to your webserver.