[opencms-dev] External editing

[Tom Howe]

I wouldn't waste time writing a client editor! The bitflux one, although 
clever is pretty awful compared with anything available on the desktop. 
Some of the browser based ones like eWebEditPro are ok, but still not as 
good as a decent desktop one. I used to use Teamsite at a previous 
workplace and the fact that you could use familiar desktop applications to 
edit the content made the most sense. Dreamweaver for html, notepad for 
text, photoshop for images etc. Now we have decent authoring tools like 
XMLSPY available for XML editing it would make sense to use them for 
content management too. The Zope plugin I mention does the job of 
triggering the relevent application and sending the contents back to the 
CMS engine. All that needs to be done is catch the posting of that 
content, save it to the right place and unlock the file. That way, content 
management developers can stop wasting time developing editing tools and 
get on with building better interfaces for managing workflow and 
deployment. 

On Fri, 2 Jul 2004, M Butcher wrote:

> Tom,
> 
> I evaluated creating a module to do this using the SOAP XML protocol. It 
> can be done... it's just a lot of work (mainly in implementing the 
> client). I didn't want to do it myself.
> 
> In the simplest case, SOAP functions would have to exist for checking 
> permissions, (un)locking, getting the resource, and posting the edited 
> resource. Really, that's not too bad.
> 
> I also looked at creating a XUL application (Mozilla-specific client 
> application) which would use Mozilla's composer to do the editing. It 
> would use the SOAP interface to communicate to the server. This part 
> would have been pretty difficult, though. Maybe a Python or Java client 
> would be easier.
> 
> If enough people are interested, maybe we should try to target a module 
> for 6.0. I'm fairly familiar with the OpenCms internals, and would be 
> excited to work on the communication layer, but implementing the client 
> editor interface sends chills up my spine. ;-)
> 
> Matt
> 
> Tom Howe wrote:
> > As a follow up to a post I made regarding external editing, I discovered 
> > that Zope have an external editor application that does just this. It uses 
> > a faily standard HTTP post to send the changed data back and webdav for 
> > file locking. Might be worth implementing as part of opencms..
> > 
> > URL is 
> > http://www.zope.org/Members/Caseman/ExternalEditor
> > 
> > Tom
> > 
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