The epoz project is pleased to announce the first beta version of its cross-browser visual HTML editor! Originally written by Maik Jablonski, the editor famous in the world of Zope and Plone was completely redesigned by Paul Everitt (Zope Europe Association) and Guido Wesdorp (Infrae) and Philipp von Weitershausen (philiKON Valley). The result is a very flexible editing machine based on the following concepts: - Integration epoz was designed to be highly integrable into target products. It uses Zope Page Templates (ZPT) for the XHTML templating. ZPTs hide templating instructions in XML namespaces. That way, all XHTML templates in epoz remain valid XHTML documents and should be able to be used in similar templating systems without modification. That also means, epoz can directly be used off of the filesystem or served by Apache, without any templating engine. - Document-centric and asynchronous editing Other in-browser editors simply provide a replacement for the textarea element in XHTML forms. epoz instead focuses on document-centric editing. It lets you edit the contents of an XHTML document and dublin core metadata (Title, Creator etc.) in a compact and standard-conformant way. Upon save, epoz constructs a full-fledged XHTML document again and invokes a PUT request to the server. Being a standard HTTP command, PUT requests can be served by nearly any webserver, even Apache (with mod_dav)! - Customization and extensibility The looks of epoz can be modified without having to modify the XHTML templates by simply customizing the Cascading Style Sheets. Its JavaScript architecture has been modelled after the MVC concept. That means you may customize large or small parts of the editor without having to reimplement or subclass anything, but it also means extending epoz's functionality is just as easy. Where can I get it? You may download a tarball at the the epoz project homepage at Sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=84377 How can I use it? epoz comes with a great deal of documentation already. The INSTALL.txt file in the 'doc' directory should provide a small set of introductions for Zope users. If you would like to see epoz in action without having to install it in Zope, you may either download the tarball and open 'common/epozmacros.html' in your browser or visit the following URL (served by Apache, btw): http://www.philikon.de/files/epoz/common/epozmacros.html If you happen to succeed at integrating epoz into your favourite web application server, feel free to contact us if you would like to contribute your code to the project. Equally, any documentation about how to integrate, customize or extend are very welcome. What to expect for future releases - Link and image toolbox: The original Epoz editor provided a toolbox for Plone users that was loaded in a browser pop-up window. Since epoz 1.0 puts a lot of focus on document-centric editing, it places toolbox elements such as a link or image browser and table creator right on the edit page. Results for link and image searching will be loaded asynchronously in a yet-to-defined XML format. In upcoming releases, we will provide asynronous server-side methods for link and image searching in Zope2, CMF, Plone and Zope3. - Plone integration: Although we have made an effort to integrate it with Plone 1.0/2.0, we have seen that current versions of Plone does not allow an editor to take over for document-centric editing. Philipp has made a Plone Improvement Proposal (PLIP) to provide a visual editing architecture in Plone (http://plone.org/development/current/projects/PLIP5). The proposal has been accepted by the community and Philipp is currently implementing. It is expected that Plone 2.1 will be ready to be plugged together with upcoming versions of epoz. How to report bugs? Please help us make epoz 1.0 bugfree and report bugs you encounter at: http://codespeak.net/issues/epoz/ (mind the trailing slash) Further questions? Write us to: epoz-development@lists.sourceforge.net We are looking forward to your comments. On behalf of the epoz project, Philipp von Weitershausen