[Zope-dev] Barriers to Zope popularity: Part 1: wysiwig editing

[Lalo Martins]

I know this would be a major pain, and it's just a crazy idea,
but perhaps the best way to do wysiwyg editing wouldn't be
modifying an existing wysiwyg tool to be zope-aware? What good
html editors we have the source for?

I once advocated Galway; it supports javascript, vrml and a lot
of crazy stuff, it's probably feasible to make it zope-aware
and I'm sure the author would like it. But, Galway isn't (yet)
wysiwyg. Still, adding wysiwyg _previewing_ (like previous
versions of some widely used Windows tool with a name I can't
remember right now) via a gtkxmhtml widget would be a matter of
a few hours. Previewing _with_ Zope awareness is trickier, it
would probably have to send the whole source back to Zope to
process; perhaps the Right Way to do that would be adding a way
of just sending some DTML to Zope and getting the HTML back.

Ok, this isn't truly wysiwyg. But a similar reasoning applies
to true wysiwyg editors - again, any good one with sources?
(I'll slam the first one who says ``amaya'', it's a joke of an
editor). Perhaps I'm excited with Galway because I don't like
true wysiwyg for the web either :-)

<advocacy>

Actually, there's no wysiwyg web-editing. The best you can
expect is wysiwyug (what you see is what you usually get)
considering that each browser will mangle your page in a
different way.

</advocacy>

Then again I have never checked out the new Adobe thingie
eveyone's hyping. Have to try someday.


But IMHO the _best_ way (and more Zope-feeling) is some sort of
browser-based edition, like with Oracle's WebDB Site Manager. I
don't think it's hard to do with Zope; if anyone out there has
seen Site Manager, please yell. I'll check if I can put my
Oracle box on the web; if I can, I'll put a demo site you all
can connect to and ``manage'' just to see how it works. Then we
can work on something similar. After all, it's part of my job :-)

<depth>

Basically, translating all intrinsic Oracleisms to Zope, it
would consist on building pages with no real content;
everything would be read from objects elsewhere, and things
like TinyTable (and <dtml-in>) would help here.

Then in the ``managing edition'' of the page what we get is a
plain rendering, but with ``properties'', ``delete'', ``new''
buttons near all objects (of course ``new'' appears only inside
list-like sections).

This is how WebDB does it; we'd probably like to add some finer
control like allowing edition of the page skeleton. The biggest
disadvantage of WebDB is that the page structure is pretty much
fixed; you can make it _look_ a lot different, but in the end
it's as recognizeable as squishdot (regardless of the theme
used, you can see it's squishdot).

</depth>

[]s,
                                               |alo
                                               +----
--
      I am Lalo of deB-org. You will be freed.
                 Resistance is futile.

http://www.webcom.com/lalo      mailto:lalo@webcom.com
                 pgp key in the web page

Debian GNU/Linux       --        http://www.debian.org