When we created the latest revision of umbraco (an open source ASP.NET Web CMS), we were very inspired by the wiki editing process, especially the idea of editing in context rather than in a back office tool.

So we found a great user-friendly way (at least we like to think so ) to combine the ease of existing editor controls – which means that you don’t need to learn a new syntax – with the in-context wiki paradigm and still and ended up with something called LiveEditing.

The feature is shown in this podcast featuring a very enthusiastic dev team:
http://umbraco.org/blog/2008/8/30/podcast-7—the-live-editing-progress

Thoughts?

btw: I think a lot of us will be missing points like these at jboye08 :’-(

There is core/important content that *must* be right, and of high quality. This should be published by trained authors, and maybe even reviewed.

As you get further away from the “centre”, the need for quality drops. At the outer edge, there’s content that we really don’t care about at all, because usage is too local, or it’s not accessed frequently enough.

So there’s space (and a need) for all authoring models, from tight control to loose publishing.

We are currently giving courses to people how to use intranet, and then give them selfcontrol on the “staging” environment (which is sort of a test environment).

They give us a sign, we check if it looks nice and then publish to live, which is the environment where everyone can see it.

But educating the people about the intranet is necessary, otherwise it will be a mess in no time unfortunately.

In my experience, the bits of the intranet that we did free up for general authorship became much better used and rarely required moderator intervention.