Does anyone know anything about setting up a thingy on a website so that authorised users can upload documents / make simple text changes? i.e. if someone had a small business website, say, and wanted their relatively non-web-expert staff to be able to upload pdfs or Word docs on a regular basis, so they're downloadable by the public, and update the News page occasionally, without troubling the web designer.

I'm trying to figure out if this is something for which you need software and/or training, or if it's a relatively simple bit of coding that one could do with Dreamweaver and/or some html ability. I've found a lot of stuff about ftp-ing, which is all well and good and I can bluff my way through it okay, but I'm not certain it covers all requirements. It seems logical from the uploading point of view - only people with the right details can make changes, and changes can be whatever you like - but the interface isn't very user-friendly, and you have to create the pages yourself. Which isn't that hard, but isn't ideal.

In my own experience, there can be a public website, and an official-user-only login, where staff can access other pages with simple interfaces for uploading files and updating text. These automatically link through to the correct public pages.

Just a technical term or two would be helpful; I can find my own way if I have a basic map. It's just that Googling for "a thingy, you know, one of those things..." doesn't get me far. :)

You know you've been around fandom too long when you explain an issue with the photocopier thus: "It'll staple things if you put them through the copier, but not if you send them from your computer, using it as a printer - it's a physical problem, the printing goes through a different part of the machine than the copies." And then you almost, ALMOST continue, "It's kind of like mpreg..."

Thank god for talkative people who barely let me get a sentence out before interrupting again, that's all.

(But it would've been a nigh-on perfect analogy.)