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OK, part 1 of my proposed test is done. I have built a very small site using CityDesk. You can see it here. In the process, I made a new article (what Radio calls a story) template, defined a few variables, one of which contains a reusable snippet of HTML code, and learned a little about CityDesk's scripting language.

Pro:

• Extremely easy to use and understand. I only had to look at the online help 2 or 3 times.
• Nice publishing model -- it can refresh the entire site, or just the changed pages.
• I really like the way the whole site is controlled from an outline.

Con:

• The WYSIWYG editor sometimes comes up with some ugly and/or redundant code, especially when I pasted in text from another source, such as Word or Outlook.
• Little, or inconsistent, built-in awareness of cascading style sheets (or late-model HTML in general). I had no problem adding a .CSS file, but CityDesk doesn't "know" what a CSS file is. This is related to the code generation issues: there are little bits of inline CSS (i.e., style="..." within markup tags, but there are also lots of crufty things like <FONT> and <CENTER> tags. I think this item and the previous one result more from the vagaries of the underlying Microsoft HTML and editing controls than from anything else.
• No built-in RSS generation. However, there's a note on the CityDesk site explaining how to easily add this feature using scripting.

Feature I'd like to see:

• The ability to use external editors, such as HTML-Kit or Top Style

Overall, very nice product, especially for a version 1.x, and I will very likely keep using it for certain things.

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