How to Edit Simple Flat CSV Text Files Online?

Question

For a new website a team of translators will be editing each their own comma separated text files, files like de.txt fr.txt cn.txt etc. All such files reside in one and the same directory. Each file contains lines of plain text: on every line there are English word(s) then after a delimiter character like ; the translation in German or French etc. follows. there are about twenty of these txt files.

I would like to open up the access to such files, by allowing the translators to go online and then login in to some kind of simple plain-text-editor. Be able to read the English text and edit/correct the translations themselves, instead of manual labour cpy pasting from faxes microsoft word document and god knows what other ancient technlogies!

QUESTIONS

• What solution/technique(s) would you advise me to use here?

• Are there ready-to-implement solutions, or do i have to reinvent the weel?

• Would a single php program file suffice? and do the job in this directory?

• Or does it need to be in ajax for a live feeling?

Answer 1

Are you using a custom built CMS or something such as wordpress? Wordpress allows users to login and create posts then submit them to be approved by an editor before they are posted, or you could give them access to post them without moderation by an editor if you want. If you're using your own CMS and it needs the txt files in a certain place on your server, I would put them in a "shared folder" in dropbox this would allow them to make changes and sync automatically back to your computer. You can then set up a cron job to automatically upload files to your server once they have been modified.

If you want to create your own login for them to post the translations you can use CKEditor or TinyMCE.