Hello,
this isn't exactly a hosting question, but I thought It fits in here best anyway.

I want to make a community website with informations that matter for our community. It's not going to be interactive in any way, no forums etc., just a static site. However, maintenance of the pages will be some work and I'm looking for a way to distribute this work amongst several community members (5 to 10).

My problem is that I don't really know what would be the best environment for such distributed maintenance.

Basically I trust my other members, so all could simply get access to the same FTP account and somehow organize for who edits which file. But I'd somehow prefer if each could have his own username/password. Is that possible, to have several users with access to the same account?

I have an account on a RaQ3 now. There I can create new users, but they get access each to his own user folder only. Also I as the owner of the main account have no write access to those user accounts I create.

Or do you have other suggestions on how to best organize such a collective webmaster effort?

Another question is for HTML authoring tools. I am used to type my pages in Notepad, but noticed that many of the potential members who could help me with site maintenance, would prefer to use some sort of editor. Is there some simple, free HTML editor I could recommend to use for us all?

The site will have a structure with subfolders, like this:

community
/news
/articles
/documentation
/downloads
/projects
/project1
/project2
/help

A cool thing would be, if I could give FTP access for individual folders to the persons who will edit those respective files etc. Is that possible?

But if all have access to everything, that's ok too, just I'd prefer each to have his own password...

Any suggestions?

I don't have a dedicated server for this, so I want to keep things simple, no content management systems and thelike. The amount of content is rather limited and won't change that much.

Someone mentioned the idea to have the content in XML files and then have some procedure to "compilie" them into HTML, would such thing be recommended?

I hope someone can give me a little advice here,

thanks

An editor that may suite everyone involved might be Dream Weaver 4. You can split the screen and use either code or layout and you can also edit in either one. May be the simplest solution for all involved. This is also assuming that everyone has some knowledge of HTML.
If possible, you could setup an FTP account for each folder with its own user name and password.

Basically what you are looking for is a CMS (content managment systerm). There are many available like Typo3 (http://www.typo3.com). There are ones that cost thousands upon thousands of dollars and their are free ones! Check out this thread (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=11161). Another thing to consider, if you have time, is Aroze (http://www.aroze.com). This WILL be a very good CMS, but its currently under development. Click here (http://www.aroze.com/spec_b.pdf) for more info (PDF document).

for basic CMS templating -- which seems what you are asking for, I would recommend EditTag http://www.thebilberry.com/greg/edittag/
Your other choices would be ezPublish, typo3, phpNuke.

Hi, thanks for the replies..

I've just done some search on internet and one thing interesting seems to be WebDAV (webdav.org), a http extension for distributed authoring. There seems to be an Apache module called mod_dav.

Anyone have heared about/tried this?

Could I ask my ISP to put this module on the server? (and is it likely that he would do it?)

For the WebDAV mod_dav part of the discussion, there's a new thread (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?threadid=11244)