[Grok-dev] Re: maintaining the Grok website

[Martin Aspeli]

Hi Brandon

> I maintain a Plone site at Georgia Tech used by more than one hundred
> people, and after explaining to nearly-tearful document authors how
> their work is simply gone after their browser crash, it is clear that
> web browsers simply are *not* editors.  I have never heard of a vim
> user, nor an emacs user, losing data because of an application crash;
> at the last resort, both editors save emergency copies of your work.
> Over decades of using both tools, I don't think I've ever lost more
> than one minute of work from a disaster.

This is a general problem, of course. We are looking at auto-save 
functionality in Plone, by the way, using AJAX, to get around this.

> Also on Plone, I have had my own edits erased when someone happened to
> be editing the same document at the same time.  Even after the tedium
> of getting versioning installed, so that such changes are not totally
> lost, there seems to be very little help with the common task of
> having to merge two versions of a document.

With Plone 3, documents are automatically locked, so hopefully this 
won't happen.

> Writing content as text also allows the wonderful practice of placing
> separate clauses on separate lines, so that one can see the shape of
> sentences, see the pattern of punctuation, and judge the flow of one's
> prose.  For example, if I were editing the sentence I've just written
> as "source code", it would look like:
> 
>             Writing content as text
>             also allows the wonderful practice
>             of placing separate clauses on separate lines,
>             so that one can see the shape of sentences,
>             see the pattern of punctuation,
>             and judge the flow of one's prose.
> 
> This is what raw content ought to look like! :-) It uses lines, which
> in something like this email I'm writing are merely noise, bearing no
> relationship to what's being said, to make clear the shape and flow of
> thought.  Punctuation becomes very easy to check - look for the ends
> of the lines!  Editing becomes very easy - both vim and emacs are
> wonderful at moving lines around!  You don't waste time having to
> stare into the middle of an prematurely-formatted paragraph looking
> for the beginning of the next sentence.  And when the lines are
> finally formatted either for a text file, or a printed book, or the
> web, then the formatter can do the final task of making it look like:
> 
>             Writing content as text also allows the wonderful practice
>             of placing separate clauses on separate lines, so that one
>             can see the shape of sentences, see the pattern of
>             punctuation, and judge the flow of one's prose.
> 
> If you get used to editing text broken meaningfully into lines, then
> when you go back to normal text, you'll feel like you're trying to
> edit C source code that someone has formatted as a paragraph. :-)
> 
> Well, okay, maybe it's not that bad.  But it does feel awkward!

That's ... weird, I've never seen anyone work like this. But you're 
right, it's not a feature supported by Plone.

> Now, there are many people who don't like or don't enjoy the added
> convenience of writing text-as-source, and just want to see it get
> wrapped into presentation-level paragraphs as they type; and I have no
> quarrel with such people, as long as they leave me a way to (a) use a
> text editor for text-editing tasks

Plone supports this, via the External Editor feature.

> and (b) store and retrieve my
> content in such a way that the line breaks in the "text's source code"
> are preserved.

You can enter reST or STX or Markdown text in Plone; the WYSIWYG visual 
editor is just one option, but it's the one that makes most sense to 
non-nerds. :)

> So if the Plone we run can be induced to offer me DAV access to my
> tutorials

It can.

>, and if I can continue writing them in ReST,

You can.

> then I will be
> content.

Great. :)

> But I will, myself, miss being able to control documentation
> right alongside the source code of Grok, as well as having its strong
> and mature merging features available if I and someone else edit the
> same tutorial at the same time.

Concurrency shouldn't be a big issue in Plone 3.

Martin

-- 
Acquisition is a jealous mistress