[Zope-CMF] IEeditor - want to help me?

Babu vsbabu@vsbabu.org
Wed, 12 Dec 2001 12:51:56 -0500


Ok,

Jon Edwards pointed that my IEEditor is being a topic of discussion here... Hopefully it is not a bad thing :-

What I would like to do with it is:
- change it into an HTA for lot cleaner calling and caching
  - that way, code doesn't change really between Zope or *SP/PHP/...
  - at the moment, editor loads whatever content is there in a textarea named data:text in the FIRST form in the parent. Instead, these things should be parameters.
- Upgrade to MSHTML: This is written using DHTML Edit Control (DEC) that Microsoft says is not supported anymore. It works with IE6 now, but I've no idea how long it is going to work. I would like to upgrade it to MSHTML control - there are some advantages and disadvantages with MSHTML. Main issue is that you need to code quita lot if you have to add table editing features  for example. Good point is, you got lot better chance to produce "restricted" HTML - trust me, in a CMS, you don't want people to put in non-standard/stupid HTML. It is very lightweight, so load times are fairly low.

  Another thing that you can possibly do with MSHTML is to have people view the HTML page directly in the browser and when they focus on editable area, automatically a toolbar pops up. IMO, this *really* makes editing far easier because people can actually see how the WHOLE page is going to look like instead of page minus standard_html_* and other dtml methods. I think it plays well with TAL too.

- I was reading up on XML-RPC yesterday and it was very easy to put together a tidy service using Ed Dumbill's PHP classes. Since Zope is natively XML-RPC aware, it should be far more simpler to do this. And that stuffeddog.com speller, I got an almost working XML-RPC server implementation using aspell. I think we can easily utilize an array of XML-RPC services, served up by Zope itself to enhance the editor. Possible uses that come to me are tidy, aspell, cal, fortune etc.

 I might be overboard here, because I just got 1 day experience with XML-RPC :-)

 Even browsing for images/links etc can be in XML-RPC. That will make the editor code *very* clean, though inefficient.


I've had 2 others asking me whether we shall work together to make a good editor for Zope. I never thought of this as a useful thing anyway because I still use VI to code my HTML :-) However, on my job, I wrote and now maintain a CMS (not using CMF, but using Zope) that has been in use for 1 year and now makes and sends content to around 125 sites. Most of the users have no clue about HTML and from their view point, I can really understand why something like this might be necessary. Got CVS version of CMF 2-3 days ago and I'm *speechless*. It is too good, and I think for most practical use, you'll probably need some kind of in-browse editor. One additional reason for having a centralized CMS is because you don't want to support 100 installations of DreamWeaver!

There are 2 good MSHTML editors in Source Forge. Personally, I've never worked on any community projects, so I've no idea what to do with it! I'll need some help in upgrading this because 
 - more people, faster delivery
 - I'm proficient in Oracle and Unix. Javascript is something that I learn as I go by and am forced to code. So, if someone with real good knowledge on this is willing to help out, we can make sane code.
 - I love Zope and Python, but I'm not a guru in that. I've working knowledge, that's it.

Send me your thoughts... Perhaps this'll be fun!

Thanks
Babu
http://vsbabu.org